Camera

Undoubtedly, the camera is the main attraction of the Nokia 7610. As we mentioned earlier, the 7610 is Nokia's first device to include a megapixel camera. Up until this point, camera phones were meant for talking, with the added benefit of capturing quick photos when convenient. But nothing that could be printed with relative clarity.

With the camera, users can take pictures and record videos while on the move. The images are automatically saved in the Gallery application where they can be renamed and organized in folders.

Typically cameras on phones today capture images at 640 x 480 px and are incapable of being printed due to the lack of resolution and picture quality. However, the Nokia 7610's 1 megapixel camera allows users to take photos in three sizes: Basic, Normal, and High; for images of up to 1152 x 852 px. Large and high enough in resolution to print great photos, but not comparable to digital cameras.

All photos captured are in JPEG format, while video clips recorded are 3GPP file format. Multimedia can be sent in text messages, as email attachments, or transferred to PC via Bluetooth connection or USB cable.

Additionally, the 7610 has a good set of features bundled with the camera. Get closer by using the 7610's 4X zoom. Unfortunately, the 7610 uses digital zoom, which merely crops the image rather than actually zooming in. Thus it is not "true" zooming as opposed to just enlarging the photo. A self-timer is also present to allow users to take self-portraits. Delays can be set at 10, 20, or 30 seconds. Lastly, Night Mode makes taking pictures in low-light conditions possible by increasing the exposure for brighter shots.

A drawback is the lack of image processing features. On most phones, features such as filter effects (Black and White, Sepia, Solarization, and Negative modes), white modes (Auto, Fluorescent, Cloudy, modes), frames, or various shooting modes allow users to edit their photos after taking a shot right on the phone. However, the 7610 has no such options making it fairly weak in post-processing.

Video clips can also be captured with the same lens at either Sub QCIF (128 x 96 px) or QCIF (174 x 144 px) modes. Encoded in 3GPP codec (H.263 and AMR) format, an incredible 10 minutes worth of video can be recorded.

Examples of photos taken with Nokia 7610 are shown below:

Basic Features

The Nokia 7610 is tri-band phone (850 / 1800 / 1900 GSM for North American, and 900 / 1800 / 1900 GSM for Europe and Asia), making it compatible with most GSM networks in North America, Europe, and Asia. Additionally, the 7610 comes with a 900 mAh Li-Ion battery that has maximum talk and standby times of 3.0 and 250 hours respectively under optimal conditions.

The 7610 runs off the Symbian 7.0s OS. Symbian OS is the open standard operating system licensed by the world's leading mobile phone manufacturers. It's specifically designed for phones by providing a robust multitasking kernel, integrated telephony support, communications protocols, data management, and advanced graphics support.

Version 7.0s adds many features to previous editions, however nothing ground breaking. New features include Multiple PDP, which allows users to use multiple networks simultaneously. For example, users can surf the web using GPRS on one account, while download email from GSM data on another. The OS has the ability to intelligently choose network connections based in signal strength, allowing for multiple billing accounts. And multi-threaded multimedia framework (MMF) offers improved audio, video, and imaging.

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