It’s all about style and image. While it’s far from unusual to pick a phone for its looks, giving a run-out to a mobile with such a singular style signature as the Nokia 7900 Prism is certainly making one stand-out fashion statement.

All sharp angles and patterns, Nokia’s 7900 Prism design won’t appeal to everyone; it’s definitely one of those phones that divides opinion, in a love-it-or-loathe kind of way.

Its slimline glossy black candybar body reflects the overt Prism theme, with a symmetrical numberpad comprising triangular keys, a diamond-shaped central navigation D-pad, and scored triangle pattern decorating the back panel.

The Prism design cues continue under the skin, with an unusual piece of light manipulation - the 7900’s keypad backlighting can be switched to one of 49 different colours from a palette of onscreen tones. Complementing this, themes for the phone’s display can also be changed to a selection of atmospheric abstract patterns that blend in with the black casing.

Reflecting on the 7900 Prism’s form, the obvious question is whether this is a phone that places style over substance.

Handling

The Nokia 7900 Prism is a higher-notch stablemate to the 7500 Prism, which has similarly angular-button family traits. The 7900 has a classier spec list and build, though, sporting 3G connectivity for high-speed data connectivity, and 1GB of internal storage.

It also has a 2-megapixel camera with a flash, although unusually for a 3G phone, it doesn’t have a front facing secondary camera for video calling. Not that that omission is necessarily a deal-breaker for the target fashion audience.

Naturally, there’s a music and video player in the spec, plus full web browsing options, thanks to both a regular Nokia browser and an Opera Mini browser application.

The 7900 Prism’s user interface is based on Nokia’s familiar, mainstream Series 40 platform, so it doesn’t have Nseries style smartphone functionality. The feature rundown of the 7900 Prism, lighting effects aside, is in fact quite similar to the Nokia 6500 classic. This includes the thinline aluminium casing and longer body - 11mm slim, 112mm long and 45mm wide. At 101g, it has a weighty, solid feel in the hand too.