Video: PhoneArena’s Nokia Astound review – for $79.99 on contract, you really can’t knock on the Nokia Astound.

PhoneArena

• One solidly built handset all around. We like the choice of materials. Gives it a sense of durability all around.
• Overall, it’s one attractive looking handset.
• nHD screen provides plenty of detail, very easy to see even the tiniest of text.
• Colours on the jucier side being amoled with acceptable viewing angles.
• Softkeys are flat but exhibit nice tactile response.
• Camera buttons recessed but still more than distinguishable.
• Removing the stainless steel cover is pretty easy – access to battery, sim card and microsd card slot.
• Movement between the homescreens is very fluid (hurray)
• Symbian^3 provides a pretty good amount of customization.
• A nice new addition with the Astound is that it has the Swype keyboard. But unfortunately it’s only available in landscape (ahahahahahaha, stupid Nokia). I uninstalled swype on N8 because I can time so much faster on two hands with the standard keyboard (but with the prediction/autocorrect turned on)
• Portrait keyboard is extremely cramped. (well, 3.5″ 16:9 screen doesn’t really lend itself well in this respect). Luckily it does exhibit a really good response.
• Email experience is pretty typical of any smartphone out there. Provide user name and password – automatically sets up. (Good to hear) Full HTML offers quite a good amount of features not quite as in depth as other platforms out there.
• Differentiating itself over the C7, it has tabbed browsing (well other stuff mentioned so far differentiates over C7, draggable homescreen, portrait qwerty, Swype built in…)
• Unfortunately, overall web browsing experience is not that great. (I really want the MicroB team to go see the Symbian Browser team and give them a good kick up the arse. I am soo looking forward to Nokia with IE9.) Takes time to resize and re-render the page. Unfortunately not as responsive as we’d like. Overall a very challenging experience. (Man these guys are kind)
• Nokia social experience is nice (lolol)
• Symbian^3 music player is definitely an attractive one.  Very fluid and smooth cover flow.
• Speaker quality a little on the sharper side. Alright but not the best sound out there.
• Thanks to its gorgeous looking AMOLED display, the video watching experience is pretty fantastic.
• Video we’re watching is in DivX 1280×720 so plenty of detail. Very smooth in playback. Overall we’re very happy with the experience.
• Dedicated YouTube client – nice to have dedicated one.
• 8MP sensor – lack of autofocus definitely biggest eyesore. More fuzzy on close ups due to fixed focus. Low light , a little bit of noise, but with LED flash does oK  job illuminating scenery. 720p at 25fps a little bit choppy – lack of autofocus it doesn’t provide sharp details (well, no not if you’re filming macro stuff like things up close but it’s fine for friends, scenic stuff, most of the things people film).
• On a good note the call quality is fantastic, the voice quality is clear and distinct on both ends.
• Little bit of noise on our earpiece but doesn’t take away from the overall great experience.
• Speaker is strong in its tone and isn’t distorted in any way.
• Handset retains a pretty good amount of signal strength. We didn’t have any problems of dropped calls or losing connectivity to network and it didn’t fluctuate that much.
• As for battery life, you get two solid days of normal use before requiring a charge. Pretty nice. You’ll get at least a solid day use without the worry of having to charge it again.
• All in all for $79.99 on contract, you really can’t knock on the Nokia astound. It just offers a pretty wide set of features such as the 8MP cam, 720p video recording, video chat support , stellar design and hardware with it. Also the gorgeous looking AMOLED display which definitely gives that well rounded appeal to it.

Tags: Nokia Astound, T-Mobile

Category: Eseries, Nokia, Reviews, Symbian, Video