Nokia 7380 Review

Reserved only to very stylish people. Others may prefer to get a less beautiful normal phone and hide it.

Pros

Cons

Here is the story of a love-hate relationship. The Nokia 7380 is a phone I would have loved to love, but had to hate-love. Beautiful, no bigger than a Milky Way(tm) chocalate bar, and so relatively well balanced with a decent camera, a radio player and even Bluetooth. I'm not a refined lady -- the target market for that lipstick-shaped phone sold in Holt Renfrew luxury stores in Canada -- but people were still turning heads on me. However, using the Nokia 7380 requires skills since there is no keypad, just a spinner wheel to select numbers, a concept introduced last year in the Nokia 7280, painstaking and made necessary for style's sake. Yet, this time I kept the 7380 for more than a month and I almost grew used to it. But why didn't they include number voice dialing, a technology that has been around since 2004 and that allows, not only to dictate names but numbers.

Other than that, the Nokia 7380 is great: A crocodile skin leather back cover; The front is a full mirror that reveals the display only when you use it. The VGA camera is good and sound quality is surprisingly good enough for such a small design, both in handset and speakerphone mode. Text entry is a challenge without a keypad but the method they developped at least brings up the most likely letters first to make things faster -- but it occasionally fails. Yet, the Nokia 7380 is for people who need to be stylish at all expense. Others should choose ugly and functional regular phones.