Nokia Astound On T-Mobile Review – Specification, Features, Price

The Nokia Astound is a re-branded C7 from Nokia. It is a good looking smartphone with features that should be on a device that wants to call itself a smartphone.

Nokia Astound

Specifications

• Display: 3.5” (360 x 640) 16 Million Color AMOLED Capacitive Multi-Touch
• Screen: Gorilla Glass
• Operating System: Symbian^3.1
• Processor: 680 MHz ARM 11 CPU
• Graphics Processor: Broadcom BCM2727 GPU
• Memory Internal: 350 MB
• Memory RAM: 256 MB
• Memory Storage: 8 GB
• Memory Extended: Up to 32 GB microSD
• 2G: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz
• GPRS: Class 33
• Edge: Class 33
• 3G: HSDPA 850/900/1700/2100 MHz
• 3G Downlink: HSDPA 10.2 Mbps
• 3G Uplink: HSUPA 2 Mbps
• Wireless: WiFi 802.11 b/g/n
• USB: microUSB 2.0 with charging support
• Camera: 8 Megapixel Fixed Focus
• Camera Resolution: 3264×2448
• Camera Flash: Dual LED
• Video Recording: 720p at 25 Frames per Second
• Camera Secondary: VGA
• Battery: Li-Ion 1200 mAh
• Battery Performance (2G): Standby 555 hrs, Talk Time 9.5 hrs
• Battery Performance (3G): Standby 656 hrs, Talk Time 5 hrs

Features

The Astound, like all the Nokia product family, has a solid build quality over a good looking premium design. The affordable price tag is a really attractive feature on top of great usability in the form of Voice Call Quality, an 8 Megapixel camera for imaging and videos. The dedicated camera key is a useful addition along with the physical Talk, End and Menu keys below the screen. Astound comes with a multi touch screen that may not be the best in the market right now, but it holds its own in the price range. A change from the Nokia N8 is that the Astound has a keyboard in the landscape mode also. The keyboard is a bit cramped but typing is easier once you have enabled SWYPE typing. Symbian 3.1 comes with three customizable home screens that can be used to organize your widgets. The Main menu can be configured as a vertically scrolling Grid or List. Like all the Symbian OSes before this one, a long press on the Main Menu will pull up a task manager of sorts, basically list of all running applications which you can switch to or end. One more improvement which comes with the Symbian 3.1 is that all interactions are single touch based and not a mix of single and double which had tended to be confusing previously.

Verdict

Nokia Astound offers not much difference from the Nokia C7, and it also comes with the Symbian 3 which is now definitely become old, the phone seems under powered and is slow and sluggish. There is also the occasional Memory Full error mainly due to not enough memory available on the phone.

Nokia Astound

Price

The Nokia Astound is available for $79.00 on a two year contract from T-Mobile. It is an affordable and reasonable entry level smartphone; however, for the same price there are better alternatives in the market.