Nokia Lumia 610 review

Battery life on the Nokia Lumia 610 is quite impressive. It's only packing a 1300 mAh battery, which might not sound like much, but certainly held up well in our tests.

With light use - around 45 minutes of web browsing, 30 minutes of music, 30 minutes of calls, downloading a few applications and taking some photos - it lasted a whole day and night and was still just about hanging in there when we plugged the charger in the next morning.

This was with 3G enabled at all times and emails regularly being pushed to the phone.

With fairly continuous mixed use the battery didn't fare quite so well, running down in around eight hours. But this was with a hefty amount of gaming, web browsing and videos. This roughly matches the time quoted by Nokia of seven hours of video use on a single charge, while the 3G talk time of up to 9.5 hours also sounds reasonable.

Its strong battery life is probably in part due to how low end it is, with a fairly small screen and slow processor, which shouldn't need much juice to power. All in all though, its battery performance easily matches slightly higher end phones, such as the ZTE Tania.

If you want to get even more life out of the battery there's also a battery saver option buried in the settings menu. This can be turned on as and when you want it, or set to enable automatically when the battery gets low. It simply switches off some inessential services - for example, emails won't automatically be pushed to the phone and applications won't run in the background.

The battery can be removed too, which is always a blessing, since it makes it easily replaceable should it ever wear out.

On the connectivity front, the Nokia Lumia 610 offers Wi-Fi support for b, g and n, as well as HSDPA at up to 7.2Mbps for downloads and 5.76Mbps for uploads. Bluetooth and GPS are also supported, and they're all easy to enable and disable through the settings menu.

Assuming you've got location services enabled, GPS will automatically switch on when you start an application that requires it and turn off again when you quit.

It's also possible to enable internet sharing, which turns the Nokia Lumia 610 into a Wi-Fi hub for up to five devices, although having five devices connected will quickly eat up all but the biggest data allowances.

HSDPA demonstrated a mixed performance - its download speeds seemed decent and video streaming performed well but uploading of images took an unreasonably long time. Wi-Fi is definitely advisable for even small uploads.

Of course you can also connect the Nokia Lumia 610 to a computer to move files to and from it, but you have to use the Zune software to do so. This is straightforward enough, enabling you to easily copy and move music, video and pictures to and from the phone.

However, we did run into some problems getting the phone to actually communicate with Zune. Our Windows 7 PC had no problems, but on a laptop running Vista the Zune software wouldn't connect to the phone at all.