The Nokia 701 represents a generation shift for Symbian. Symbian Belle is a bold step forward for Nokia and the 701 will be the initial phone to introduce the new Symbian to the world.
Nokia 701 specifications
The body of the Nokia 701 was made based on the C7, measures 117.2*56.8*11 mm and weighs 131 grams. The front of the device holds the 3.5″ IPS LCD based ClearBlack display with nHD solution and Gorilla Glass protection. The blacks are not as good as the AMOLED but it has 1000 nits of luminance make up for that. Also the IPS engineering promises 160 degrees of views. Actually it’s one of the brightest displays yet. Under the display we find the Call, Menu and End Call hardware keys while above we find the earpiece, a secondary VGA camera and the sensors.
On the left side we only find the charger plug while the right side holds the consecrated camera key,lock slide, volume rocker and voice command. On top we find power key,microUSB port and the 3.5mm popular audio jack while the bottom only holds the lanyard eyelet. The back of the display holds the 8MPx camera with dual LED flash and the loudspeaker.
Remove the battery cover and you see a 1300mAh which gives the Nokia 701 impressive battery times: 17 hours of talk time(7 in 3G), 23 days of stand by time,3 days of music playback, 9 hours of video playback, over 6 hours of video recording, 3 hours of video calling and 11 hours of navigation(courtesy of Nokia Maps).Under the battery you find the microSD card slot while the SIM card may be accessed without removing the battery.
The Nokia 701 will be powered by a 1GHz CPU with 512 MB of RAM and will run Symbian Belle. It will aslo feature NFC technology. Since the power is a lot more than Symbian is applied to the Nokia 701 is very fast and responsive. The Symbian Belle brings a new homescreen and menu, altered apps and a new polished interface. It also brings 6 homescreens with person wallpapers that you may add or delete. Widgets may be re-sized and you may even put shortcuts on the homescreen.
Another big alter is the addition of a pull down menu similar to Android’s notification area. This is where you will find all the notifications and toggles for mobile data,Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and silent mode. The Menu has likewise been changed and it gets better functionality and it’s more easy to use, though it’s not as commodious as other OS menus. The task manager remains the same.
Nokia 701 has an 8MPx camera with fixed focus and dual LED flash. It has a new interface but the changes are largely cosmetic. It offers a lot of scenes, Flash modes and other choices like face detection, self timer, settings(ISO, white remainder and others) and geotagging. Picture quality is good though images tend to be over-sharpened. Detail amount is a great deal and even low light pictures look good. Video recording is done at 720p @ 30fpswith stereo sound. Quality is likewise great.
The browser has a new interface and bettered usability but not one thing groundbreaking. It also has text reflow support,flash support and Kinetic scroll. Over all the browser experience is good, zooming is liquid and there are no page breaks. Also Nokia claims that the browser on Symbian Belle is three times quicker than the one on Anna.
In terms of connectivity Nokia 701 offers it all: quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE aid and five-band 3G aid with HSPA (14.4Mbps download and 5.76Mbps upload), Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, USB with On-The-Go support, FM Transmitter, NFC and audio jack that may be applied as a TV-out.
Despite the fact that the Nokia 701 isn’t very impressive in terms of hardware(except for the screen which is actually impressive) it has more than sufficient features for the Symbian Belle to run very smooth and fast. It might not be a flagship but it leads the way of the new generation of Symbian devices.