Nokia 7900 Prism review: In colored light

Music player is really nice

The music player is a slightly upgraded version of the one used in the Nokia 6500 classic. It has improved looks with a new theme added but otherwise is not different in terms of functionality. Besides managing all the typical functions of a music player, it also sorts songs by artist, album and genre.

Music player user interface and available settings

The player works with MP3, MIDI, AAC, AAC+, and WMA formats. The supported A2DP profile allows listening on Bluetooth wireless earphones. The player is highly customizable through a number of themes that are at your disposal. These were all quite eye pleasing.

In the retail package you will find a wired headset. There is very little chance that you will fall in love with it but if you use your player rather rarely however, and do not expect wonders from your headset, it may just do the job. The handset features a microUSB jack for connecting the headset, so using another set of headphones may just turn out impossible, unless you manage to somehow find a suitable adapter.

The sonic experience of the player is enhanced by an equalizer and a stereo expansion function. The equalizers do deserve attention, as they perform very well and have nice graphic visualization. Nokia 7900 has only one loudspeaker located on the rear, right next to the camera. We did already mention that we weren't impressed by its performance at all.

There are 7 available equalizers on Nokia 7900

However, on the positive side, we have to mention that it does not get muffled at all when the phone body is placed on its back on an even surface such as a desk.

Unfortunately there is no FM radio on Nokia 7900; the other Prism does have one. So if you get bored with the music player all you can do is turn the video on. The video player is compatible with the 3GP and MP4 formats. Videos can be played in fullscreen mode, as well as fast-forwarded or rewound. The possibility to remove the soft key captions to make better use of the full screen view mode is nice and generally improves video watching.

Gallery

We personally aren't great fans of how the gallery looks in Series 40 models but, as it's used as a file manager at the same time, we will be lenient. For example you do need a few extra presses to get to your music files, as there is no file filtering. The Gallery relies on your putting the right type of files in the right folder.

The gallery on S40 mobiles also does the job of a file manager

There are three different views for the gallery: list with details, list and grid. Once you pick a picture you can zoom on it to see more detail. Zooming itself is not the fastest thing around and doesn't allow a picture to be zoomed in too closely, so actually it is not much of a help.

Three different view modes are available for the gallery

The pictures can also be viewed in fullscreen and can be edited with the built-in picture editor. The latter however offers very limited options, but considering the fact that there are very few users that actually use a picture editor on their phones, this is understandable.

Viewing a picture in fullscreen and zooming in on a picture

The final extras of the gallery include the available Slideshow and Search options. The latter is quite convenient for finding a specific file in overfed folders but we still believe that gallery on Series 40 could be improved a lot. That goes true especially in user friendliness and we do hope that sometime in the future the file manager and the gallery of these phones will be separate applications.

Another mediocre camera

Nokia 7900 is armed with a 2 megapixel camera with image resolution of up to 1600 x 1200 pixels. Typical of Series 40, camera settings are not the richest you can imagine, but with this shooter they are more than enough. They include white balance settings, three quality settings going form basic to high, and various effects. Sequence shots and shooting in both portrait and landscape mode are also among the available extras.

Nokia 7900 camera user interface

The flash can be forced to on, regardless of the light conditions, and used as fill flash. Naturally, an automatic mode for the LED is also available. In terms of performance however, we weren't impressed at all with its performance. It is probably a little better than the LED flash we found on the Nokia 7500 Prism but still fails to achieve decent quality pictures on most occasions.

The camera itself is not the best we have seen either. Frankly, it is not even near average level. It has no lens cover and is only a little recessed to avoid scratches. We have already mentioned that this seems not quite enough for us but we can't do anything about it.

The lack of a dedicated button is another real downer when it comes to operating the camera. It is quite uncomfortable, especially when shooting in landscape mode, to use the confirm button of the D-pad for that purpose.

"...Photo quality is about average for a 2 megapixel camera; in favorable weather decent images can be produced, sharp enough, with less artifacts and more precise colors. Noise levels are high in areas with no detail like the sky for example. Given the absence of autofocus, you'd rather not take a picture of a closely situated objects or text..."

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Photo quality is about average for a 2 megapixel camera; in favorable weather decent images can be produced, sharp enough, with less artifacts and more precise colors. Noise levels are high in areas with no detail like the sky for example. Given the absence of autofocus, you'd rather not take a picture of a closely situated objects or text, as they will surely be blurred. If you want to have any chance of reading captured text, the photo has to be taken from a distance.

Sample photos from Nokia 7900 camera

Finally, a few words about the camera speed. Nokia 7900 is not nearly as slow as Nokia 5310 in that aspect but still not the snappiest around. It won't take ages to save a picture but you cannot expect that to happen in a blink of an eye either.

Another disappointment is the QCIF video capture resolution of the Nokia 7900's camera. Inadequate is the mildest we can call it, as video clips made in that resolution are by no means usable. The fact that the length of videos in 3GP format is only limited by the free memory available comes as little consolation. Zooming is also available but that cannot stop us from calling the video capturing a sounding failure. It is even worse than the still camera performance for that matter.