Nokia Lumia 610 review

The Nokia Lumia 610 comes with quite a few pre-installed apps. There are many of the ones you'd expect to come with a smartphone, such as a calendar, a weather forecast app, an alarm clock and a calculator.

The calendar is quite versatile, enabling you to view it by day or month, or as a scrollable agenda or to-do list. It also imports birthdays and events from Facebook and other social networks. It enables you to set reminders and displays upcoming calendar entries on your lock screen.

The alarm clock, on the other hand, is rather more limited. It enables you to set alarms as one offs or recurring events, but there's no option to set a timer or use it as a stop watch.

The Nokia Lumia 610 also includes Nokia Maps and Nokia Drive, the former being a fairly standard piece of mapping software, which generally worked well and locked onto our location in a matter of seconds. There was one occasion, though, when it insisted our location was half a mile away from where we actually were.

Nokia Drive, meanwhile, is a sat nav app. It's not as feature-rich as most of the premium, stand-alone sat nav systems you can buy, but it does have maps for most of the world, all of which can be downloaded to the smartphone for offline access.

However, the limited storage available on the Nokia Lumia 610 again proves limiting here, since you won't be able to store too many maps at once.

The phone also comes with the full mobile version of Microsoft Office, enabling you to create, view and edit Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents.

Documents hosted on SkyDrive are automatically shared to the phone. Once finished with a document, you can then save it to the device or upload it to Hotmail or SkyDrive. We found the office suite quite useful for viewing documents and making light edits.

For more major editing it would help to have a larger screen or a physical keyboard, but as a mobile utility it works well.

Additional apps can be downloaded from the Windows Phone Marketplace, and sadly this is one area where Windows Phone in general struggles to compete. Although Windows Phone Marketplace is becoming larger all the time, it's still tiny compared to Apple's App Store, and very small even compared to Android's Google Play.

Apps are also a problem for the Nokia Lumia 610 specifically, because thanks to its tiny 256MB of RAM, many things won't run. The official figure for incompatible apps lies at only a few percent, but that includes many of the more premium applications such as graphically intensive games.

Even certain things that you'd expect to run don't currently, because they haven't been optimised for it - Angry Birds being a popular example. In the case of Angry Birds, a fix is said to be in the works, but Skype is another notable casualty, and there's no word on that being made available.

The app market itself is the standard Windows Phone Marketplace, and is reasonably well laid out, with various categories and sub categories to sift through, and user reviews of apps to aid purchasing decisions.

If we have any complaints it's that the heading and app names take up far too much space, meaning that when viewing lists of apps it can only fit a handful on the Nokia Lumia 610's small screen at a time, leading to an awful lot of scrolling.

Once downloaded, apps appear in your applications list (or Games hub in the case of games), and can optionally be pinned to the home screen.