Nokia Lumia 710 (T-Mobile)

When does the Windows Phone 7 wow start? The Nokia Lumia 710 is a perfectly fine midrange cell phone which offers a solid collection of features with an easy-to-use OS for only $49 with contract, and free turn-by-turn navigation is a tasty bonus. But this phone doesn't glow with the must-have desirability that a new platform needs to take off, which means it's unlikely to draw many likely Android or iPhone buyers away from their phones of choice.

Physical Design
Yet another nondescript black slab, the Lumia 710 is nearly indistinguishable from many other similar phones when it's switched off. It's made entirely of black plastic, with a curved, soft-touch back and a shiny front panel that attracts finger grease much too easily. The whole body feels a little cheap. The three Windows phone action buttons—Back, Home, and Search—are part of a raised physical bar below the 800-by-480-pixel, 3.7-inch screen.

I'm not particularly impressed by Nokia's "ClearBlack" display. Yes, the polarizing layer greatly reduces light reflections and makes blacks look very black, but using cheap plastic rather than glass for the screen makes images look a little fuzzier than on the competing HTC Radar 4G ($99, 3.5 stars).

At 4.7 by 2.5 by .5 inches (HWD) and 4.4 ounces, this is a relatively small, light phone that will fit comfortably in most hands and not weigh down pockets. It lacks the reassuring solidity of the competing metal-bodied HTC Radar, though.

Along with the slightly raised power button, there's a standard MicroUSB charging port and 3.5-mm headset jack on the top panel. Like most Windows Phones, there's no memory card slot here; you get the 8GB you get, and you don't get upset.

Network and Connectivity
The Lumia 710 is a decent voice phone, although it has some quirks. Signal reception is fine. Sound through the earpiece is crystal clear, although transmissions let some background noise through on the other end. Wind creates a major problem with the speakerphone, causing it to skip and stutter; it's a loud speakerphone otherwise. 

I had no problem pairing the phone with my Aliph Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset ($129, 4 stars), but it had one irritating bug. Voice dialing had to be activated by pressing the phone's Windows button the first time after I connected the headset. After that, I could activate the voice dialing directly from the headset, and it was accurate.

The 710 connects to T-Mobile's network using HSPA+ 14.4, which is disappointing when you consider the network supports HSPA+ 42 speeds. This isn't a 4G device. I got speeds slightly faster than an HTC Radar that was in the same location, averaging around 1.5Mbps down and .8Mbps up. That's much slower than HSPA+ 21 phones such as the Samsung Galaxy S II ($299, 4.5 stars), which can get 5-6Mbps down. There's no Wi-Fi hotspot/Internet sharing option on this phone. It's a world phone, though. Battery life was acceptable at 6 hours, 18 minutes of talk time.

Setup, Performance and Apps
Windows Phone 7 is easy to use, but Nokia is trying to make it even simpler with an exclusive, custom setup service. I wasn't able to try this, but when you buy a Lumia, you'll schedule a call so a Nokia rep can sit you down and help you set up your phone for an hour. That's pretty neat.

The Lumia 710 uses the same 1.4GHz Qualcomm S2 processor that you'll find in the Samsung Focus Flash ($49, 3.5 stars) and Focus S ($199, 3.5 stars), and it's definitely faster than the previous generation of Windows phones. Robert Varga's WP Bench software rated the CPU 40 percent faster, just like the megahertz number said, although overall performance is slower because memory and GPU performance is pretty much the same as on the previous version. Windows Phone has never felt sluggish, though, and the phone zipped along in normal use.

Nokia's flagship, exclusive apps are Maps and Drive. Drive gives you free, spoken driving directions, which no other Windows phone has (all Android phones do, however). Nokia's maps, meanwhile, are much more attractive and readable than Bing Maps and include public transit routes. Neither app is much good for arbitrary directions, though—while you can find directions from where you are to somewhere else, you can't ask for directions between two other points.

But that's not all! At Nokia World in October, Nokia pledged an array of big-name, exclusive apps for its Windows Phones, including games from EA, kids' apps from Sesame Workshop, and an ESPN app. Those apps will appear in the "Nokia Collection" area of the marketplace at launch.

The Windows Phone Marketplace now has 50,000 apps, so you'll be able to find apps to do the things you want. They may not be the same apps as your friends with iPhones and Android devices have, though: while I could easily find various kinds of games, news, and sports apps, for instance, they were often different brands than you'd see on the other platforms. That's been one of Windows Phone's problems: Get a Windows Phone user in a crowd of Android and iPhone owners and she can't participate in their specific app conversations.

Windows Phone has plenty of other unique, appealing features, such as excellent Facebook and Twitter integration and XBox Live support. For more on the Windows Phone Mango OS, read our full review.

Multimedia
The 5-megapixel camera with 720p video capture is on the back panel; there's no front-facing camera, unlike on the HTC Radar. The camera initially appears very fast, but like some other "fast" cameraphones, that just means it can take pictures before the autofocus locks in; with an itchy trigger-finger, you'll have blurry photos. Give the autofocus half a second or so, and photos are sharp but a bit dim. The 720p videos come with the same issue: Much of my test footage was blurry because I wasn't patient enough to let the focus lock in. The videos record at 24 frames per second, which is smooth enough but falls short of the 30 frames per second I prefer.

Music and video playback work the same as on all Windows Phones. You use the Zune client on PCs, or Windows Phone Connector on Macs, to sync H.264, MP4, or WMV videos of up to 1080p resolution, or most popular music formats. 

Windows Phone's music and video players have a few tricks up their sleeve that you won't find on other platforms though. There's an FM radio built into the phone. If you add third-party media apps, new content will appear integrated with your own. For instance, I found Vevo's music videos interleaved with my own in the Video tab.

You also get some useful third-party media apps. T-Mobile TV has a wide range of smooth, sharp major-label live TV stations. Nokia's TuneIn Radio streams local radio stations from around the country. Both worked fine on T-Mobile's network.

I found a few bugs, though. Some wired headphones had a bit of static or a popping noise in the background, which may have been a problem with my individual Lumia unit. I didn't hear the audio artifacts with all pairs of headphones, however.

Conclusions
A decent, well-priced device, the 710 would sell well on an already successful platform. But it's not the kind of must-have shocker that would cause people to take a chance on a new OS, and that's what Windows Phone 7 (market share: 1.5 percent) needs. Windows Phone 7 is smooth, easy to use, and delightful, but as uber-blogger Robert Scoble puts it, it isn't considered "safe" in families where the influencers—the tech-savvy friends and relatives—all have iPhones or Android devices.

There are three ways to see the Nokia Lumia 710. Measured against our standard review criteria, it's a fine midrange phone. Buyers will, by and large, be happy with it. While its build isn't as solid as the HTC Radar, you get more here for less money with the 710's faster processor, free turn-by-turn navigation, and custom setup service.

But as a way for either Microsoft or Nokia to finally break through in the U.S. market, the Lumia 710 is a damp squib. It's a solid follow-up phone without anything to follow up from. It's a secondary product that should benefit from a more prominent device's halo, but there's no halo glowing over it. The Lumia 710 is the best-value Windows Phone on T-Mobile, but it doesn't convincingly squash the free-with-contract Samsung Exhibit II 4G (Free, 3.5 stars) and T-Mobile MyTouch (Free, 3.5 stars) on the "safe" Android platform, not to mention AT&T's iPhone 3GS (Free, 4.5 stars).

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