Nokia 7280 - PCMag
November 30th, 2005 - Posted in Nokia
Undeniably gorgeous and deeply strange, the Nokia 7280 phone is by far the coolest phone we’ve seen yet. The 7280 looks far more Saks Fifth Avenue than Circuit City, burying its surprising power in a shell that looks like a fashion accessory, not like a phone. We see it as a second phone for the fashion-forward. Think of it as the phone for the girl who goes home with the guy with the RAZR.
Why even bother to put this thing through lab tests? (Though, of course, we will.) The 7280 is really about how its design inspires longing. As my attractive and not-all-that-techie wife said, “As soon as I saw it, I thought, ooh, lipstick! I don’t even wear lipstick! But I want one.” Even the power adapter is beautiful, with its built-in cable turtle.
Closed, the 7280 looks like an art-deco lipstick case with a tiny, 1.5-inch mirror. The fabric Nokia tag on the phone’s edge and felt pads on its side blur the line between technology and clothing. Recently, we’ve seen more and more manufacturers, such as Samsung, partner with designers to play up the fashion aspect of their phones. The difference here is that the Nokia 7280 truly lives up to the hype.
Pull gently on the ends of the 7280 to light up the sharp, tiny screen. This is when you’ll become puzzled as to just how you dial the thing. There are three options, in fact. The best is to hold down the bottom soft key to voice-dial from your phone book. This is low-rent voice dialing: you have to record your own tags, and there’s no way to dictate numbers rather than names. (If ever a phone needed VoiceSignal, this would be it.) You can also use the iPod-like scroll wheel to zip through your phone book, or use the scroll wheel to roll through a string of numbers, picking out digits one by one—by far the most awkward method.
Battery life is a bit of a mystery. Nokia quotes an extremely short 3 hours of talk time and various Internet reports back up that pathetic number, but our tests got better results. Don’t count on this to last more than a night at a time; then again, the 7280 is not designed to be a primary phone, it’s designed to be taken out for the evening.
You can also pair the 7280 with your PC as an EDGE modem. We did so and, in our tests, the phone delivered Internet speeds up to 149 Kbps. It also has a decent speakerphone, a voice recorder, a thoroughly average VGA camera, a good FM radio that works with the included wired headset, and a complete Bluetooth implementation that paired easily with our Logitech Bluetooth headset and transferred files to and from our PC. There are no games or Java, but, really, who cares? This phone is all about looks, looks, looks—and it’s got those in spades.
Via: PCmag