Nokia 7500 Prism - The Attention Grabbing Mobile Phone
Nokia’s most current “candy bar” format phone is an attention grabber, and it’s geared very much to the person who regards their mobile as not just a necessity of modern life, but an expression of personal style and fashion. The overall look of the device is distinctive, with it’s angular cut outs and pattern of rhomboids over the back surface – these make it both distinctive in appearance and easy to grab, a nice touch.
The phone itself, while not meant to be a multimedia powerhouse, doesn’t exactly skimp on those features either. The phone has a two mega pixel camera, with four resolution settings from 120×160 pixels up to 1200×1600. Conveniently, the camera also tells you how many more photos you can take at the current resolution, and gives you a small set of Photoshop-like filters, such as solarize, sepia tinting and posterize. The night mode is adequate, and the LED flash is functional – for a mobile phone camera, it’s more than adequate, and good for fun snap shots on holiday, but for serious photography, as always, you’ll want a dedicated device. The phone also plays the usual range of music formats, from MP3, to AAC to WMA and a few others. The standard headset jack is a welcome relief, though you’ll want to invest in some decent headphones rather than stick with the ones provided.
As a telephone, the audio quality is good, though the placement and shape of buttons determined by its unique form factor is a bit disconcerting. The two function buttons are in odd places – when we used it initially, we had a few odd moments. The biggest drawback on using it as a phone is with the small display, which is trapped inside a mirrored bezel; this is fine if you’re indoors, or the sky is overcast, but you’re likely to blind yourself when it catches the sun.
The user interface is the standard Nokia Series 40 5th edition operating system, and has Nokia’s usual attention to detail. With plenty of customizable themes, and the well laid out and easy to use phone book feature (which can show names, names plus numbers, and name plus picture), there’s a lot to recommend the way Nokia manages data in a small amount of space. The most significant drawback on the contact book feature is that you’re limited to searching only on the first name you entered a contact by, which can get frustrating at times.
Where the Prism shows its full colour spectrum is as a fashion accessory – the box comes with several snap on plastic parts that you can use to change the trim color. This seems trivial, and banal, but it’s amazing how much this feature changes the look of the phone. We’ve already seen two after- market accessory packs giving a wider range of colors from what comes in the box – a blue, a black and pink trim set. Test exposures to some sample fourteen year old girls showed this feature was an absolute must, particularly when combined with the twelve loaded themes in the set, and the ability to download more.
All in all, the Nokia Prism is an excellent multi-function phone with more than a small nod made towards fashion and customizability.
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