Sum n substance:

Thumbs up: smooth slider mechanism, brilliant pictures, fab designing, good call quality.

Thumbs down: low volume  levels, slippery keypad, awkwardly placed memory card.

Inside the trunk:

• Technology GSM
• Band GSM 850/900/1800/1900 (Quadband)
• Phone Design Slider
• Changeable Covers / Faceplates Yes
• Antenna Internal
• Vibrating Alert Yes
• Polyphonic Ringer Yes
• Voice Dialing Yes
• Call Timer Yes
• Conference Call Capability Yes
• Voice Recorder Yes
• Speakerphone Yes
• Wireless Interface Bluetooth 2.0
• Additional Features TV Link , Radio Data Service (RDS)

THE WHIZ-KID SPEAKS: The Nokia Supernova series has a range of four phones, out of which the 7610 looks the most interesting and promising. Targeted at a large female audience, this slider phone poses tough competition to the largest slider phone manufacturer in recent times, Samsung. This slider phone does not really face any tough competition, though there is an entire ocean of slider phones in the market thanks to the brilliant features.

Razzle-dazzle: Atleast going by the design of the supernova 7610 it is not in anyway similar to the older 7610. The older one was kind of bulky and though I don’t want to be rude, the older one was kind of a bit over the top as far as the designing is concerned. This is kind of more on the subtle design, being sleek and un flashy. Doesn’t really stand out in the crowd but is still worth all the talk. It comes with two interchangeable covers in black and red for the back but the only problem I faced is that the cover doesn’t come off all that easily. It stands kind of really slim according to nokia standards at 3.86 inches by 1.89 inches by 0.59 inch and weighs about 3.48 ounces which is pretty much light enough.

Again trying to catch the eyes of the female population, the display of this one could easily double up as a mirror. The display is glossy and is more or less like a fingerprint magnet. It also supports an impressive 16.7 million colours which is awesome and the vibrant and animated images only stand as a proof of it.

The navigation array of the supernova 7610 comprises of a four way toggle key along with the talk and the end buttons and two soft keys. The keys on the navigation array are pretty much spaced out and comfortable to use.

The slider mechanism is pretty smooth and very rarely stiff. Behind the slider is the keypad. I was kind of disappointed with the keypad, though it has the same design of flat keys like most of the slider phones, the keys are highly slippery and shiny. Also the letters and the numbers on the keys are small, I literally had to squint at times to make through the digits. This surely isn’t one of the best texting experiences that I ve had.

On the right spine of the slider is the micro-USB port, volume rocker, and the music player shortcut along with the camera shutter. The charger port along with a 2.5mm jack for headphones is situated above the phone. The Micro SD slot has been awkwardly placed behind the battery.

Inside dope: It’s got an inbuilt memory of 64MB, however it can be expanded to upto 2GB using a micro SD card. The phonebook can be used for 1000 entries with each entry saving upto five numbers, email address, URL, company name and job title, a nickname, street name and birthday.

It comes loaded with a 3.2 megapixel camera which can take pictures in six resolutions ranging from 2,048×1,536 pixels down to 160×120 pixels. I was pretty much impressed by the quality of the photos. Not only were they vibrant and bright but also they hardly displayed any noise expect for some amount of negligible noise around the edges. After you are done with taking the photos you could directly store them in the 64MB inbuilt storage or probably get yourself a new 2GB Micro SD card.

Coming to the music players, this one  is definitely the show stealer with a quality similar to the one offered by the Xpress music range, it definitely should score high on any music lovers list. It supports creating your playlists and also is also pairable with Bluetooth.

The tracks can be used as ringtones and it has support for MP3, MP4, AAC, AAC+, and WMA files. The sound quality using the inbuilt speakers isn’t all that satisfactory, I would recommend using headphones for better results.

Back to the most important characteristic… the call quality. The voice quality was pretty much crisp, clear, and the sound was clear enough with hardly any static or interference. The only complaint that I had in this department is that the volume was kind of low and the voice was not that audible in noisy places.

On the other end too, most of the callers could not make out that I was talking using a cell phone but a few of them complained about some background noise. Apart from that there were hardly any glitches atleast as far as the call quality was concerned. Here again like in most of the cases the headset calls were more satisfactory as compared to the speakerphone calls.

It has a battery life of about 5.4 hrs talktime and 12.5 days on  standby mode. Here again I would like to mention that the theme colourize feature is pretty much eye catching and is  comparatively better than anything that has been ever been offered by Samsung atleast.

Nitty-gritty: Basically a phone aimed at the masses, this one isn’t a smartphone but is a decently attractive conventional features with some real good stuffing and design. Plus the slider design is something which is totally out of Nokia’s portfolio so I assume it should gain real good popularity amongst the loyal fans of the Korean manufacturer. So surely this one could be your pick if your looking out for a conventional Nokia phone which is high on the glam quotient and has got some real good stuffing too.

My rating: 3.25 on 5

Popularity: 58% [?]