Nokia Lumia 710 review

Battery

The battery life on the Nokia Lumia 710 suffers in the same way as the Nokia Lumia 800, providing a day's usage between changes. Long gone are the days of the endless battery life.

This isn't surprising, since the Nokia Lumia 710 has a measly - albeit removable - 1300mAh BP-3L battery, compared with the Nokia Lumia 800's (non-removable) 1450mAh BV-5JW.

Nokia states the Lumia 710 as being capable of up to 7.6 hours 3G talk time and up to 400 hours GSM or 3G standby time, compared with up to 9.5 hours 3G talk time and up to 265 hours GSM standby and 335 hours 3G standby on the Lumia 800.

When we now compare this with the specs for the HTC Radar, with its 1520mAh battery and up to 600/485 hours GSM/3G talk time and up to 480/535 hours GSM/3G standby, we note the improvements needed from Nokia.

The only advantage for the Nokia Lumia 710 is that, as the battery is removable, maybe someone like Mugen will develop a higher-capacity battery replacement.

Charging up the Nokia Lumia 710 is no different to the rest of the latest breed of phones out of the Nokia stable, using a micro USB connection on the top of the phone. One difference to the Nokia Lumia 800 is that there's no connector cover this time, with the micro USB socket exposed at all times.

As with other Windows Phone handsets, there is an option within phone settings to enable automatic switching to battery saver mode when the battery level drops below a preset figure. Once enabled, certain services such as automatic synchronisation of emails and app background tasks are switched off.

Connectivity

Connectivity on the Nokia Lumia 710 is no different to that on the Nokia Lumia 800, with a USB to micro USB cable included in the box for physical PC connectivity for synchronisation, data transfer and USB charging.

As with the Nokia Lumia 800, the Nokia Lumia 710 also supports Bluetooth 2.1 +EDR, and Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n with the usual WEP, WPA, WPA2 (Enterprise & Personal) enabling both wireless accessory usage and Wi-Fi synchronisation with the Zune PC software, if you're prepared to take the battery hit.

The first time we connected the Nokia Lumia 710 to the PC driver, installation went smoothly and we were asked to install Zune software onto the PC, even though it was already installed. A bit of polish is needed by the software developer here, maybe.

Once the PC Zune software was opened with the phone connected, it checked for updates and found one, which it installed. Then the phone was ready for use.

The PC Zune software operates similarly to iTunes with iOS devices, requiring that you set up your music and videos in a folder structure and set the software to monitor it. There's an option for it to automatically re-structure and rename the files and folders based on changes to track details within the Zune software.

Once set up, transferring music, podcasts, videos and pictures on and off the Nokia Lumia 710 is as simple as you like, with the option to automatically sync all, by playlists or manually. To make things even easier, the Nokia Lumia 710 can be set to automatically synchronise with the Zune software via WiFi when non charge and in range of your home WiFi network.

As with the Nokia Lumia 800, the Nokia Lumia 710 isn't automatically recognised as a USB storage device, but this can be rectified by running a little third-party app that makes a small change to the registry on your PC to enable this.

In addition to the media transfer that uses the Zune software, contacts, email and calendar events can be synchronised with your PC's Outlook data via Windows Live and the Windows Live Outlook Connector add-on.

Finally, an additional advantage of the Windows Live service is that the Nokia Lumia 710 can access, modify, and save OneNote, Word, Excel and PowerPoint files on a 25GB provisioned space on SkyDrive, Microsoft's cloud service.