Nokia 7390 review: Fully loaded glamour

It remains a mobile phone

Nokia 7390 is equipped with a 3.2 megapixel built-in camera. The finest images have 1536 x 2048 pixels, but lower resolution is available as well. Each resolution selection further offers three quality levels – high, normal, basic. The higher the resolution of the image, the longer it takes the phone to save it, but also the better the result is. Logically, the lowest quality corresponds to the smallest image size; if you are to send images in MMS, then shooting at higher resolution simply makes no sense.

Taking picture by using the tiny external display

The phone can be held horizontally due to the comfortable location of the camera release button. The display remains somewhat tipped out, but it doesn’t matter for shooting. The camera release button has two positions. When half-pressed, it runs the autofocus. A full press takes the shot and saves the image. Besides, you could also shoot by pressing the confirming center of the control key; the only difference is that you will not be able to use the autofocus function.

If the camera is not active, a press on the release button opens the camera control interface, which provides a structure overview of the most important settings. That is why most of the latter (like camera activation, number of images/amount of time left, zoom application, white balance or other effects) are visible straight on the display.

Camera viewfinder • camera menu • the viewfinder in the camera mode

Right next to the camera you will find a LED for night shooting. Both LED settings and flash are user-configurable. This way you can choose whether the image you are shooting should be constantly illuminated or just automatically, after a press on the release button.

Even though we checked every single spot of the interface, we could not find a function for switching between the front and the back camera. It seems that every time you need to make yourself a self-portrait, it will be necessary to turn the phone and ask somebody to adjust the image on the display. A closer look at the photos taken with Nokia 7390 reveals that the number of megapixels is not the only decisive quality factor. The pictures are characterized by disturbing noise, which only disappears when light conditions are perfect.

Have a look at various sample photos taken with Nokia 7390

The errors typical for any non-final firmware are most visible in the camera application. Even though according to Nokia official site the highest video resolution in Nokia 7390 is 352 x 288 pixels, we also found a 640 x 480 option in the camera settings. Nevertheless, when we selected the latter, the camera refused to run and displayed a “no memory” alert. In a result, we had to switch to the lower, standard resolution anyway.

It is a pity that Nokia has once again lowered quality standards. Many users would have appreciated good quality video records in VGA resolution (640 x 480 pixels) than 3 megapixel images of average quality. Besides, Nokia has already proven its skills in VGA in models like Nokia 6280 and 6233.

File manager in the memory

It will organize your life

The calendar is practical and quite complete so we will only make a brief overview of its options. Month and week views are well organized; the calendar stays visible in the top part of the display, while the bottom bar is reserved for the events on each day.

The organizer offers 5 event types: meeting, call, birthday, note, and reminder. Inside the meeting type you will find other options like subject, place, starting date and time, end date and time, alert date and time, alert type, repetition (never, daily, weekly, monthly, annually).

Organizer’s menu • alarm clock

The task list is very simple. Here you can only add subject, priority, deadline and alert type. Accomplished tasks can be marked off; tasks can be organized in an alphabetic order or by deadline as well as moved into the calendar.

The phone offers useful text notes that get synchronized with PC and allow longer texts to be downloaded into the phone. A single note could contain up to three thousand characters.

Calendar

Nokia 7390 features a pretty good alarm clock. It wakes you up with any sound from the phone memory. You can even use the radio as an alarm. The sound comes out through the speaker, but do not forget to plug in the earphones as they serve as an antenna. Without the earphones the radio will not run and the phone will wake you up with a standard sound. Repetition days and even the intervals between repetitions are user-configurable.

Further in the organizer menu you will find a countdown timer, a stopwatch with split and lap timing, and a detailed calculator managing not only basic mathematical operations but also memory, goniometrical, power or fraction operations. Also available are several Java applications: size converter, world time, and the so called Sensor (similar to its symbian brother).

A menu with extra functions • smart size converter

There are four preset Java games in the phone. In the application Music Guess you can try recognizing music pieces. Rally 3D – as clear from the name - is a racing game. Two mobile legends meet in an attractive even if not so successful 3D version of the famous Snake. The last game is a flash Sudoku.

Four games for boring moments