Nokia Lumia 710 review

Julian Prokaza wasn’t overly impressed with Nokia’s first attempt at a Windows Phone 7 smartphone, so will the new entry-level Lumia 710 fare any better than the mid-range Lumia 800?

IT Pro Verdict

The Lumia 710 is a solid smartphone that, despite its technically lesser specification, somehow manages to be a better than the Lumia 800. Windows Phone 7 still has some way to go before it can compete with Android and iOS on features, but this is the most convincing marriage of smartphone hardware and Microsoft’s new mobile OS we’ve seen so far.

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The Lumia 710 may be an entry-level WP7 smartphone, but this isn't really reflected in its core specification. Its single-core 1.4GHz Snapdragon processor is the same as the Lumia 800's, as is the 512MB RAM, but the Lumia 710 only gets half the amount of user storage at 8GB. This being Windows Phone 7, there's no memory card slot, either.

Nokia Lumia 710

The Lumia 710 also only offers tri-band GSM rather than the 800's quad-band, but its 3G and Wi-Fi support is otherwise the same, as is its array of sensors.

Given the very similar specifications, it shouldn't be too surprising then that the Lumia 710 has essentially the same performance as the Lumia 800, too. It gave essentially identical scores with the WP Bench synthetic performance, BrowserMark web browser and SunSpider JavaScript benchmarks namely 91.47, 32,964 and 6895ms, respectively.

For partial comparison, the iPhone 4S scored 85,565 in the BrowserMark test and 2207ms in the SunSpider test, while the Samsung Galaxy S II scored 35,139 and 3423ms, respectively.

One area where Nokia has cut back on the Lumia 710 is with the screen, but as we hinted at earlier, this isn't necessarily a bad thing. The Lumia 810 may have packed a brilliant, vibrant AMOLED display, but its underlying PenTile Matrix technology meant that its image quality was far below that expected from the 480 x 800 resolution.

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