Nokia 7210 Supernova review

Part of Nokia’s 2008 fashionable line-up of phones, the Nokia 7210 Supernova is a slim candybar that became available in September, in two color versions: Vivid Blue (the one I’m reviewing) and Bubble Gum Pink.

Save for the yet unreleased Nokia 7100 Supernova, the 7210 is the cheapest Supernova phone to date and also the one that offers the most modest pack of features.

But this doesn’t mean it can’t be a good phone for customers who don’t need a myriad of high-end capabilities, right? Especially since Nokia sells the 7210 for a retail price of around €120 ($150), depending on the country you buy it from.

Nokia 7210 Supernova design

Unlike the other Supernova phones, the 7210 doesn’t come with changeable Xpress-On covers. Instead, it features a pretty cool color transition effect, visible on the left and the right sides of its display.

The phone is only 11 millimeters thin (10.6 mm, to be precise) and it somehow resembles the 5310 XpressMusic, another ultra-slim Nokia candybar.

To be honest, I think the 7210 Supernova looks better than the Nokia 7610 Supernova, although the latter is the Supernova flagship. Of course, when it comes to features, 7610 Supernova is better, but that’s another story.

Overall, Nokia 7210 Supernova has a simple look, mainly because it has no buttons on the sides whatsoever. It only has a charger connector on the left side and, on the top, a 2.5mm Nokia AV connector, a Micro USB port and a backcover-release key.

The back of the phone is also simple, with a 2MP camera and a loudspeaker.

The keypad of Nokia 7210 Supernova may look cool, but it’s kind of hard to get used to. It has rubber-like stripes between the keys, which really don’t help when you are typing something. I believe it would have been better if Nokia had opted for an entirely-flat keypad, but that’s just my opinion.

Anyway, some might find the keypad to suit their fingers perfectly, but only if they don’t have large thumbs.

Display & interface

The display of Nokia 7210 Supernova is among its best features. It’s only a 2-inch one, but it has 320 x 240 pixels and supports 256K colors, so the images and animations look good. Even more, I’ve noticed that, under the sunlight, the display of 7210 offers a better image quality than the display of the 7610 Supernova flagship.

The handset runs on Nokia’s popular Series 40 user interface, so it’s as simple and straightforward as it gets from this point of view.

7210 Supernova’s menu lets you discover its features with ease, but if you want quick access to various applications you should turn on the Active Standby mode.

There are 5 themes that can be used to change the interface’s look, and you can download more if you like.

Connectivity, call quality

Nokia 7210 Supernova features tri band GSM connectivity only (900 / 1800 / 1900 MHz), with GPRS (Class 32, 88 kbps) and EDGE (Class 32, 296 kbps).

The phone further features Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP and USB 2.0, and it can be connected with a PC via Nokia PC Suite.

In terms of signal reception and call quality, the handset performs well, which is no wonder, since it’s a Nokia.

Multimedia, camera

The music player of Nokia 7210 Supernova can play MP3, AAC, WMA and MIDI files. It won’t stun anyone with its aspect, but it’s cool that it can run in the background. An equalizer is also featured, to let you choose the sound style you like best. Unfortunately, the phone has no dedicated volume keys, and I really don’t understand why Nokia didn’t include them.

To let us make use of that 2.5mm jack right away, Nokia offers a pair of headsets with the 7210 Supernova. They’re nothing great in terms of sound quality, but I didn’t expect them to be anyway.

The headsets also function as an FM radio antenna, so whenever you want to listen to the radio (which has RDS, by the way), you have to insert them into the above-mentioned 2.5mm jack.

The 2 Megapixel camera packed in Nokia 7210 Supernova doesn’t have autofocus or flash. However, the outdoor photos are not that bad, and I think most of the users will be quite happy with their quality (considering the phone’s price, of course).

A not so great thing is that there’s no dedicated camera button. Also, the camera is kind of slow: every time you take a picture, you have to wait about 5-6 seconds for the phone to save it, and that’s not quite cool.

The phone can also record video at 176 x 144 pixels and 15 fps, but the resulted videos are obviously of poor quality.

Web, games, others

The 7210 Supernova comes with a WAP 2.0 browser only, thus you won’t be getting any full HTML browsing experience on it. However, you can install Opera Mini if you feel like a WAP browser is not enough.

You can send and receive emails on the phone, via POP3 and IMAP4 e-mail accounts. Also, you can chat through various IM services.

The phone’s organizer provides a nice calendar, a notepad and a set of alarms that will surely get you up in the morning if you keep the phone’s volume at its maximum.

A nice and useful application is the Flickr one, which obviously lets you upload photos to the Flickr website, provided that you have an account there.

There are also several pre-installed games (3D Snake included), plus Nokia WidSets, Yahoo! Go, size converter, world clock and other stuff like this.

Memory, battery, SAR value

Nokia 7210 Supernova has a built-in memory of 30MB, but you can use only slightly over 20MB. The phone’s package doesn’t include a MicroSD card, but, if you want to, you can install cards of up to 2GB. Note that you need to take off the phone’s back cover in order to insert a card.

The battery of 7210 Supernova is a BL-4CT one. Theoretically, it’s said to last up to 2 hours in talk time or up to 250 hours in stand by time. I’ve found these values to be pretty close to the truth, which means that a regular user will have to recharge the phone once in 2-3 days.

As for the SAR value, the user manual of Nokia 7210 Supernova says: “The highest SAR value under the ICNIRP guidelines for use of the device at the ear is 1.29 W/kg.”

Availability & Conclusion

Nokia 7210 Supernova should be easily found in most of the cell phone stores from across Europe (and I believe Asia too). As I already said, its price is of €120 – or even less – hence we are not wrong calling it a budget phone.

All in all, if you don’t want to spend more than $150 on a handset and you have nothing against Nokia 7210 Supernova’s keypad, this tiny and thin 3G-less candybar could be a good choice for you.

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Posted on 20 Dec 08 - Filed in Nokia, reviews - Comments - Written by ilinca

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