Nokia Lumia 710 hands-on (video)

We’ve been bedazzled by the better-end Lumia 800, but here’s Nokia’s more modest offering: the marginally thicker, less expensively built — but still distinctly Finnish — Lumia 710. At 270 Euros ($375) excluding taxes, this promises to be a keenly priced device when it starts hitting Western markets, and it might prove cheap enough for emerging markets too. But without that special something that makes the 800 stand out, can it compete against the growing army of mid-range Windows Phones from manufacturers like Samsung and HTC? Read on for our initial impressions.

Nokia are experts at cutting manufacturing costs without making it obvious, and a few of that expertise is visible here. The plastic covers are thin and versatile, but there wasn’t much flex once we held the device — it feels solidly built. The only let-down is the usage of stiff hardware buttons beneath the three.7-inch display: Back, Home and Search (which brings up Bing). It is a bit annoying to interchange from touching a sensitive capacitive touchscreen to a hard hardware button, so it might had been nice if these were touch sensitive too.

The screen isn’t nearly as stunning as that at the 800 but it’s standard fare and gets the job done. It’s nice an big, befitting the bold live tiles of the OS, and these tiles looked as if it would flow and open up smoothly at the 1.4GHz Qualcomm processor. After all, a good number of these tiles are specific to Nokia and could — if all goes to plot — help to distinguish this device from other Mango handsets, a minimum of on the software level.

There’s some confusion at this point in regards to the availability of this device. Officially, the inside track is that it’s coming to the united kingdom, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands and Spain by the tip of this year — and we predict that’s accurate. However, the rep inside the video says the 710 won’t reach the united kingdom until Q1 of next year. We’re working to clear this up asap — but for now you’re probably safer ignoring that component of the video.

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This post is tagged: capacitive touchscreen, emerging markets, hardware button, hardware buttons, initial impressions, special something, western markets