Nokia 7380 review

Nokia 7380 Review

Reviewed by: Andrew Lim

Reviewed on: 21 March 2006

Features
As with the 7280, the problems arising from having a scroll wheel are immediately obvious. Everything on the 7380 is activated via the scroll wheel, known as the Nokia Navi Spinner. If you want to write a text message you have to scroll through the alphabet. In an attempt to make things easier, the first five letters are A, T, S, I and O, which are supposedly the most commonly used letters. There's also predictive text, which will learn your most popular words, so writing texts should become easier in time.

With telephone numbers, a similar system is adopted, except you scroll through the numbers 0-9. If you have to enter numbers on the 7380 mid-call, for instance to choose an option on a menu, you have to navigate to the number-entry section, by which time an automated customer-service line may have hung up. However, in defence of the scroll wheel, once you've gone to the trouble of inputting telephone numbers, scrolling through them is a joy. While at first texting and inputting numbers is tedious, after some practice it becomes much easier. You have to keep in mind that the 7380 is designed with fashion in mind, so don't buy it if you're a hardcore texter or business executive -- unless you want a cool second phone to use in the evening.

As an alternative to the scroll wheel, you can use the audio-message feature, which bypasses the whole scrolling process and lets you record messages and then send them. Unfortunately, this is not compatible with all other phones and therefore not as useful as texting itself.

The 2-megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom is made all but redundant by the thin screen and mirrored front. The display is too small to view photos properly and the lack of a dedicated shutter button is annoying. The flash is an LED light, so don't expect high levels of illumination. You can transfer the photos via Bluetooth or USB, but unlike the 7280 there is no infrared.

The 7380 has 52MB of internal memory and no external memory card slot, so the number of photos and MP3s you can store is limited. You can cram in around 100 high-quality photos or around 13 MP3 tracks. You get a pair of white Nokia headphones with the phone that aren't very comfortable -- they're too round. If you've got other Nokia headphones you can use them, but not standard 3.5mm-jack 'phones, as the port is proprietary.

There is GPRS and a WAP 2.0 Web browser, but it is completely let down by the tiny screen. As with the 7280, you can use it as a modem with a laptop or handheld, but this is not the most practical solution. The other unimproved niggle from the 7280 is the lack of dedicated volume buttons, making changing the volume mid-conversation difficult, as you have to pull the phone away from your face.

Performance
Call audio on the Nokia 7380 was good -- the sound was clear and loud. The speakerphone is not very loud, but adequate if you're in a quiet environment.

Battery life lasted around 8 days on standby and 3 hours of talk time -- average for a non-3G phone. GPRS and Bluetooth connections were good and we encountered few problems pairing the handset with Bluetooth headsets and laptops.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Nick Hide