Nokia X7 review

Nokia's X7 looks great. But does it end up being too much of a compromise?

The definitive Nokia X7 review
The definitive Nokia X7 review

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Right then, here's a place where the Nokia X7 ought to shine. The large screen and its AMOLED technology should be able to do video footage justice.

Given that video playback is one of the USPs of the Nokia X7, you might wonder at the low screen resolution. But actually video playback on the 360 x 640 screen is remarkably good. This is particularly the case if you're looking at video shot on the handset itself, but it works equally well with third-party video too.

DivX, XviD, MP4, H.264, H.263 and WMV are supported and our sample files in all formats were smooth and displayed good colour performance. Video and photos are brought together in a single screen, and you just tap at a thumbnail to view what you want.

Sound quality is good too. There's plenty of volume from the two speakers. You'll remember before we mentioned that the four corners of the chassis look like speaker grilles, but only two house speakers.

Storage is a bit of an issue, too. There's a mere 350MB of internal memory. Now, Nokia does provide an 8GB microSD card, but that's hardly enough, really, to keep us happy. Not when the Nokia E6 offers up to 40GB of storage with the built-in and external memory.

Nokia x7

The handset is quite comfy to hold when viewing moving media, though to be honest we'd have liked a kickstand so we could prop the thing up and sit back comfortably.

The integrated YouTube player picks up video from the web and streams it nicely, too.

Nokia x7

Audio is handled by a player that sadly failed to pick up album art from our microSD card. Still, again output from the built-in speakers was quite good for our audio files, if a little high on the tinny tones.

Nokia x7

There's an equaliser with precious few presets and no chance to set up your own – we'd have liked that option.

You can slap a widget onto a home screen to give you control of music playback when you're not in the player, and if you hit the tiny album art thumbnail it offers, it'll open up the full player.

Nokia x7

An FM radio delivers nice quality sound and quickly searches and finds new stations - you obviously need the headphones as usual, but on the whole it's a static-free experience.

Nokia x7

It also offers a link into the Ovi store in case you fancy buying a little bit of music.

Nokia x7

There's an app to use with the Nokia DAB headset should you prefer DAB to FM.

However, Nokia doesn't offer either an FM transmitter or any kind of DLNA support. For a media-focused handset the latter, in particular, really ought to be here.