The Supernova series comprises four models which were featured in an earlier article spotlighting the world announce. The most interesting of the four is Nokia 7610, judging by the number of catalog page hits and search calls. Attaching incomprehensible suffixes to the product names is quite typical of Nokia – once again, the new 7610 handset seems to erroneously duplicate the suffix originally reserved for an earlier smartphone product. Nokia 7610 isn't a smartphone, yet for a conventional cell phone it displays a very high level of functionality. It's a slider equipped with a 3.2 megapixel camera, which serves as the next step in development of the 6500 Slide and 5610 models; another spin-off from the same platform, to say so.

The most characteristical feature of the handset is the Theme Colorise used to quickly swap interface colors in all imaginable ways. A detailed review of this feature is available in a later section of this article. Right now, a few more general words introducing the new product. The handset is based off the fifth revision of the S40 software platform, which is due to the limitations of the hardware platform. The lower-ranking 7510 model uses the sixth revision of the S40 software platform, for instance. Supernova series' signature Xpress-on models come in a variety of colors, letting you customize even the physical features of the handset.

Nokia are targeting Supernova at a largely female audience (still firmly counting on the male buyer, but to a lesser extent), trying to attack Samsung on a front where the Koreans hold especially strong positions. The Korean manufacturer is famed to favor the slider form factor, and Samsung female-tailored sliders enjoy an unmatched popularity on the market. However no known Samsung product can offer an analogous functionality in this segment. U600 is probably the closest alternative, yet incapable of posing direct competition to Nokia 7610.

Despite its distinct orientation towards the mass market, 7610 has no direct competitors, which is a very intriguing combination. Talking in advance let's note out that the solution is rather controversial; yet an active advertising campaign planned for Supernova handsets and a scarce number of highly functional fashion slider models from other manufacturers are the two factor that are going to overcome any possible criticism and further bring the product to the top of popularity. Nokia now have at their disposal a full set of variations of the same platform: 5610 stands for music, 6500 Slide stands for business, 7610 now stands for fashion. Marketing seen in action.

Design and Ergonomics

Nokia 7610 Supernova is a mid-sized, lightweight slider, entirely made of plastic. Two color versions are available – the dark and the bright ones, each coming with two changeable panels. The dark variant comes with blue and turquoise panels, the bright – with blue and red ones. These the Xpress-on panels, a standard element of design customization which has been used by Nokia in a number of earlier products. The moment is especially actual for a youth audience. Theme Colourizer is the company's next move catering to the youth tastes. It changes the splash screen and Navi backlight to match a specified color. This unique feature will be discussed a bit further in a special section of this article.

The style of Supernova's design is intentionally kept very neutral. It is likely to attract both female and male audiences. Unfortunately the compromises, simplifications and concessions introduced to reach this goal make the handset's exterior look a bit plain, at least too plain for a top-ranking fashion-oriented solution. The only original thing around is the mirrorlike pieces reminiscent of Sony Ericsson's emotive solutions. However even these elements look slightly out of place.

An Xpress-on panel feels like rubber when you touch it, to be more precise it sports an actual thin rubber coating, which will never let the handset slip out of the hand. It's held very tightly and won't ‘peel off' just by accident, which from another point can be considered a downside: hot memory card swapping becomes unavailable. Bright-colored star-shaped stickers are supplied along. The assembly and materials show us a very good example of what is the proper way and substance for making a durable and good-looking phone. Unlike 6500 Slide, there are no metal pieces, save for the back panel of the upper sliding part. All the parts fit each other tightly, the surface coating is resistant to physical damage.

Thanks to the compact size and low weight, 7610 feels as natural appendage of your hand, every aspect of shape, size and weight is very balanced. From the point of ergonomics, the handset is close to ideal yet not ideal. The keypad lacks any bump marks though the buttons are well-segmented, have a sufficient move, the backlight is of a white color, it's very even and neither too bright nor too dim. The main block of controls has coupled buttons for dial and application actions, which is not everyone's cup of tea. In practice though the navigation is pretty easy.

The side edges of the casing host a number of slots and buttons. The hardware platform of 6500 Slide and 5610 imposes a number of unfortunate limitations like a 2.5 non-standard headset jack, the storage expansion slot hidden under the battery cover and so on. None of these is critical though, especially in a fashion phone. On the upper edge, neighboring the headset jack, the power button and the charger jack are located. The right edge hosts a two-position camera button, the volume rocker and the player button (pressing this will de-pause and pause the current track. The left edge has a microUSB slot covered with a protective flap.

The speaker is sunk into the back surface, though sound distortions are minimal even if the phone rests on a surface. The sound volume is enough to hear from a distance, so no problems on this front. The upper part of the slider's bottom is the habitual residence of the camera lens. It is left unprotected, so careful handling is strongly advisable. Building the camera into the top part of the slider would have been a more reasonable decision, apparently.

Theme Colorise

This function was briefly mentioned above, but this section of the article dwells on the topic more thoroughly. The feature is simple yet very effective, especially as seen by the female half of the audience - now it's a matter of seconds to make your phone fit the color of your evening dress or handbag.

Here's how it works. The right virtual button on the main screen conjures up the primary menu of the application. For a couple of seconds, you see a splash screen which can be skipped by pressing OK when it appears but can't be totally gotten rid of in the options.

After that, you find yourself with a viewfinder window and a semi-circular palette displaying different shades of the currently selected color, a total of sixteen. This is done dynamically, so you don't have to press the shoot button each time you want to update this palette.

Once you have captured the required colors, a second push of the shoot button confirms the choice, after which you are prompted to select one of the three effects: Soundflora, Waves, Globetrotter. Keeping the chosen palette intact, each of this effect mixes the colors in a unique way.

In about 99% of cases the color recognition is done correctly, the application never lags during data processing. This application may have varying grades of importance to different people, but personally the male testers of Smape.com considered it a one-shot toy. This goes contrary to our girlfriends' opinion - they spent a lot of time toying around, trying to find color matches for their latest wardrobe additions.

Not only the menus and the main screen are affected by Theme Colorise, but the backlight color of the navigation button as well. Unfortunately the keypad remains unaffected, which in a way breaks the perfection. Still a great fun for the fair sex.

Memory

The new product comes with a 64 Mb of onboard memory, and a microSD card can always be used for expansion (no hot swapping is available though, as mentioned above) The selling package includes a 512 Mb card, however cards of a capacity up to 2 Gb are supported.

Screen

Nokia 7610 Supernova is equipped with a QVGA TFT screen (320x240) which is typical for this product class, the diagonal is a bit shorter than one would want – 2.2''. The color palette is 16M. In the real life, the screen image looks very pleasing – with good contrast, bright and vivid-colored. The view angles are just perfect. Unfortunately, this excellence ends where the daylight begins, the screen heavily affected by glares in direct sunlight due to the sort of coating used applied to the front glass.

Connectivity

The new 7610 is a quad-band phone (GSM 850/900/1800/1900) and supports Class 10 EDGE. It has no WCDMA capabilities, which only proves the guess that this product was designed exclusively for the mass market.

Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR is what Supernova offers in the wireless connectivity department. It functions quite well, we weren't able to detect any problems during the tests. The options include activation state (on/off), the list of accessible devices, the visibility state, device name and a variety of other standard parameters. All the associated services are also quite standard.

The Bluetooth stereo headset (A2DP) also brought about no problems, the maximal sound volume is quite sufficient and can be adjusted manually. The following profiles are available:

? Dial Up Networking Profile
? File Transfer Profile
? Generic Access Profile
? Service Discovery Application Profile
? Headset Profile
? Handsfree (Car Kit) Profile
? Generic Object Exchange Profile (OBEX)
? Object Push Profile
? File Transfer Profile
? Basic Printing Profile
? Audio Video Remote Control Profile
? Advanced Audio Distribution Profile
? Enhanced Data Rate
? Dual Profile Bluetooth (Voice & Data)
? vNote

USB 2.0 is the means for wire communication which the new handset has to offer. The data transfer rate isn't the highest around, though. There are four connectivity modes available: Modem, Mass Storage, Media Player, Printer. The required mode is selectable from the corresponding menu and can be set as default, or optionally left for prompting each time you plug the phone cable into your PC.

The radio unit has the same nice-looking interface. The headset provides a very decent quality of sound, to say the least. The theme is independent from the theme used by the mp3 player, so the both applications can be configured to sport different skins simultaneously. Up to 50 radio stations can be saved to memory in a specified storage folder. Auto-search and RDS capabilities are also in.

Software Platform

As it was noted earlier, the top-class Supernova is based off the firth revision of S40, so there aren't any platform-wise peculiarities that have not been discussed in the previous articles dealing with S40 E5 phones. Please refer to 6500 Slide and 5610 reviews on our site to find out more about S40 functionality.

The only thing worth mentioning in this article section is the Theme Colorise feature, which is a rich pack of themes – actually more of them than any Samsung product could ever offer.

Camera

For a fashion phone, the camera looks not bad – a 3.2 Mp auto-focusing unit with an integrated flash. In this aspect, the model is fully analogous with 6500 Slide and 5610; the Slide handset possesses Carl Zeiss optics though, which gives it a little boost putting it above the two other models in the sense of image acquisition quality… The flash is effective at distances not exceeding a meter and a half. The camera is deprived of a lens guard. The shoot button is a bit too tight . A 20x digital zoom is available. The volume controls serve as zoom controls while in the shooting mode.

The camera interface is fully analogous with Nokia 6500 Slide / 5610, here we see the very same options and possibilities. The interface utilizes a landscape orientation, though a portrait mode is also available as an option. In the viewfinder mode, the screen displays a number indicators telling of the current settings: the resolution, the storage folder, the zoom ration, the timer info, the remaining number of shots, the flash on/off state and so on. Everything's simple and clear.

Pressing Left, we pass on to the settings menu, consisting of the following items:

Only a few options are available, the number of effects is minimal, but that's still great for a music phone. The extra settings include:

Image resolution:

A really reassuring point here: besides just choosing between the onboard memory and the memory card as the storage location, the user can specify an exact folder to save files to.

A photo can be instantly sent over attached to a text message, via Bluetooth or sent for printing. The photo can also be set as a wallpaper, logo, call image for a specific person or a user group. There's also the scaling option, functions like Rotate and the contrast settings (a ten-notch scale).

The acquired image can be instantly transferred to the graphics editor (which has only the very basic set of functions)

As a result, the phone's extras in the aspect of video editing are rather modest, being nothing beyond the basic required level.

Things are even simpler when it comes to the video, there are no editing options but there's a function that allows you to strip the sound away from a clip completely. The video record length is only limited by the remaining amount of free memory, three quality presets offer you a choice between High, Normal and Low, the supported resolutions are 640x480, 352x288, 176x144 and 128x96. The video quality among the best found with the today's camera phones, and within the music phone segment 5610 is the absolutely unquestionable leader, the only disappointment being the relatively low framerate of just 15 fps. On the whole, the video acquisition quality is on a level with Nokia 6233 and similar models.

Performance

Java implementation is done on a good level, no differences are observable if we compare it to the other members of the S40 5th Edition family. The processing rates are quite nice:

Battery life

The model is powered by a BL-4S 860 mAh battery. The capacity is plainly unimpressive, though in practice the battery life tests lead quite reassuring results:

Market outlook

Nokia 7610 Supernova produces a very ambiguous impression; on the one hand are the excellent stuffing, the interesting and audience-befitting feature of Theme Colorise and so on, but the other hand holds a deficiency in the image power, as long as the position of the series' flagship is concerned; even the changeable panels don't help the cause enough.

Despite all the surrounding controversy, 7610 is bound for success; the price floats a bit above the reasonable assessment, yet we wouldn't say that the product is too overpriced. The large-scale promotional campaign and the famed brand loyalty of Nokia's fans will also improve the situation, given that a fashion slider is a rare occurrence in Nokia's portfolio. At the same time, the other companies offer a number of analogous solutions at lower prices (e.g. Samsung U600), though those aren't marketed as members of a dedicated fashion slider line.

The very Supernova line itself is an interesting phenomenon. The mass-wise targeting tends to simplify the models, turning them cheaper than an average solution from the class. This comes at the price of a less pronounced image. How bad is that? Of course, part of the audience is lost but an even bigger part is added. Supernova is a serious blow delivered to Samsung, which is reputedly strong in this segment.

7610 should be viewed just as described above, it shares little with the top-ranking products of similar concept, for it is a purely mass product. Nokia cleverly used the design peculiarities to differentiate three products based off the same platform: the musical 5610, the businesslike 6500 slide, the fashion-powered 7610 Supernova. Each of the variations enjoys considerable demand, and the new product doesn't like an exception either.

Over a few weeks, Supernova became one of the most talked about phones of the recent time. Nokia is promising to launch the two color versions of the handset into full production by the beginning of the third quarter.

Editor's Opinion

Nokia 7610 Supernova is a solution targeted at the mass market, displaying a good balance between the stuffing and the design. The image impact is rather modest, regardless of the series' flagship title. The price, on the other hand, is quite inoffensive and the functionality keeps on a high level. That's a compromise bound for popularity.

+ Changeable panels
+ Theme Colorise
+ Attractive price
+ Decent camera
- Controversial design
- Screen gets too glared over in sunlight

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