But the opportunity arose for us to get our hands on a US version of the forthcoming Nokia 7610 Multimedia Phone, it does have the same avant-garde design as the 7700 but without the edam cheese design that has us all in stitches. So perhaps just perhaps now that we have a Nokia phone that is acceptable to the eye it will also measure up on the inside?

The 7610 tips the scales at 118 grams which is about average for a phone with this many features and its footprint of 109 x 53 x 94mm is a little larger than most of the Nokia range, this is in part due to the 176 x 208 pixel screen which can display 65k colours. The resolution is quite low for a 1 mega pixel camera phone, the standard for most smartphone is now 320 x 320 although the Nokia screen is one of the brightest we've seen.

Battery life is a claimed 180 mins talk time and 10 day standby from the lithium Ion 900mAh battery, charging is quick after the initial 16 hour charge, from flat to full should take no more then 2 hours, enabling Bluetooth does eat the battery faster so its best to leave it switched off if you have no intention of using a headset or other BT enabled device.

The Nokia 7610 is a tri band GPRS ready device which can handle enhanced MMS and SMS, other forms of connectivity include Bluetooth V1.1 giving a 10 meter 1mbit connection and a USB port which is a very welcome addition for a mobile phone allowing easy connection to windows PC's for the active sync software to do its stuff. Connectivity is very important for this phone as Nokia promote it heavily as a unified device this is shown in the fact that it ships with Lifeblog software making the &610 ready for bloggers to upload their lives activity direct from the handset.

The RF performance of the 7610 is quite special, its a tenacious little chap chaining onto even the weakest of signals, alongside LP's T68i and P800 it was still going long after the other two had lost network, add this to a good loud earpiece and excellent audio quality it works well in its basic function as a mobile phone.

Now Nokia want this to be a multimedia phone and its credentials look promising, packing a 1 mega pixel camera capable of taking shots with 1152 x 864 pixels using a 4 x digital zoom its certainly a step up from most camera phones. There is a standard mode and also a nigh mode for taking snaps in low light conditions (nudge nudge) as well as stills you can also capture up to 10 minutes of sub QCIF (128 x 96) MPEG-4 video, the 7610 also supports 3GPP and Real Video formats and can capture at QCIF resolution with a reduction in clip length.

The onboard memory may only add up to 8mb but it ships as standard with a 64mb reduced size MMC card, this is great but the size reduction means standard MMC cards need an adaptor and sub MMC cards are limited in their availability. You can easily send MP3 or other audio files to your phone for replay much like an MP3 player, quality is ok but its no Ipod!

Applications can be found in every orifice of the 7610, there are the usual suite of communications applications allowing email and SMS plus web browsing with support for HTML, XML and WML (WAP) there's real one player for audio and video replay and the lifeblog tool mentioned earlier. The Nokia supports Java MIDP 2.0 applications so you can download everything from games to business applications to run on the symbain OS.

Onto the nitty gritty what is it like to drive, well like its block of cheese cousin the 7700 it has a great menu system, which is very intuitive and easy to navigate even when on the move, data entry via the keypad is easy despite the small keys. Almost all of the applications with the exception of the lifeblog are simple to operate and do not require a visit to the user manual. The camera takes good quality photos and they are easy to extract via the USB port, sadly the mini MMC card is a pain in the butt and we think Nokia should ditch this and go for SD cards.

The styling is far more mainstream than the edam inspired 7700 and the 7610 is available in both black and silver, the rear of the phone has a nice aluminium effect surrounding the camera lens and this model is very well built, no rattles or creaks and no gaps in the plastic, overall a class act.

No phone is ever spot on and Nokia have been so far away from "spot on" for the last few years its great to see them get it almost right, apart from the MMC cock up this is a good phone and one that should sell well..

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