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Internet -via Wi-Fi or 3G - is fast and responsive on the Nokia Lumia 710, sharing the pre-installed Internet Explorer browser with the rest of the Windows Phone stable.
Connection times are substantially faster than Symbian devices, taking around four seconds to open the full (non-mobile) TechRadar site. These speeds are more akin to the top-end Android and iOS smartphones, as we found in our Nokia Lumia 800 review. Both Nokia phones share the same hardware and software that affect this performance.
As with the WiFi internet speed the Nokia Lumia 710 and Lumia 800 are on a par when using 3G for internet surfing taking around three seconds to initial load the Techradar website with text and fixed images and a further five seconds to load the rest.
This two part method means that you can be reading the articles whilst the animated areas of the site are still loading. With Internet Explorer directed to the mobile internet version of the site the load time was cut to nearly two seconds for all info.
Although Internet Explorer is pinned to the start screen out of the box, the space can be saved since most people, once used to Windows Phone, prefer to use the bottom left search button to open Bing and navigate from there.
This holds the same for the Local Scout app, since once Bing has been opened, four touchscreen buttons appear at the bottom of the screen, providing access to Local Scout, Music Scrobbler, Text/Barcode Scanner and Voice Recognition Internet Search.
Local Scout provides location-based information on shops, bars, restaurants and attractions.
The Music Scrobbler app listens to background music and searches for it in the Marketplace.
Text/Barcode Scanner scans barcodes, QR Codes, Microsoft Tags, books, CDs and DVDs, plus can translate scanned text - with mixed results, so we're undecided on this function despite it being a really cool feature.
Voice Recognition Internet Search starts a web search based on spoken words.
One major limitation that remains from the Nokia Lumia 800 is that Flash Player still hasn't arrived. According to the Flash Runtime Team at Adobe, although they are working with Microsoft to provide a Windows Phone Flash Player solution, "Windows Phone 7.5 Mango will not support Flash Player". Hopefully it will appear in Windows Phone 8 later this year.
