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Nokia 7380 Review

About.com Rating three out of Five

by Eric Bernatchez
for About.com

Nokia 7380

Nokia 7380

Nokia

The Bottom Line

Reserved only to very stylish people. Others may prefer to get a less beautiful normal phone and hide it.
Pros
  • Good speakerphone and earpiece sound quality
  • Exceptional design
Cons
  • Spinner wheel makes navigation easy but text and number entry painful

Description

  • Technology: GSM
  • No keypad, text and number entry is done using a spinner wheel.
  • Bluetooth support

Guide Review - Nokia 7380 Review

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.

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