Nokia X7-00 review: The stealth xpress

Organizer is great

Symbian has good traditions in the Organized department and the Nokia X7 with Symbian Anna is no exception. Nokia has just tweaked a thing or two.

The calendar has four different view modes - monthly, weekly, daily and a to-do list, which allows you to check all your To-Do entries regardless of their date. There are three types of events available for setting up - Meeting, Anniversary and To-do. Each event has some specific fields of its own, and some of them allow an alarm to be activated at a preset time to act as a reminder.

The calendar has seen some further touch optimization

The Nokia X7 also allows you to browse office documents thanks to the preinstalled Quickoffice application. The Adobe PDF reader is also here to take care of those .PDF files, while the ZIP manager allows you to deal with digital archives on the go.

Quickoffice is here but editing costs extra

Unfortunately, the preinstalled Quickoffice version doesn’t support editing, but we doubt much of the X7 target audience will need it anyway. If you insist, you can get the paid upgrade and enable editing.

There's also a PDF reader and a ZIP manager on board

The calculator application is very familiar but it lacks the functionality of some of its competitors. The square root is the most advanced function it handles and this is hardly an achievement. If all you do with it is split the bill at the bar though, you're more than good to go.

The calculator is hardly the most functional around

The organizer package also includes a dictionary, voice recorder, as well as the Notes application. The good unit converter we’ve come to know from Symbian^1 is strangely gone but you can grab one yourselves from the Ovi store for free.

The dictionary, the voice recorder and the notes app continue the organizer marathon

The alarm application allows you to set up as many alarms as you want, each with its own name, set-off day and repeat pattern. As we already mentioned, thanks to the built-in accelerometer you can also snooze the alarm by simply flipping your phone over.

You can set an unlimited number of alarms on the X7

Social networking integration

The Nokia X7 comes with social networking integration, part of which we saw in the phone book. The Social app however is the nexus for al things social - it supports the two most popular networks, Facebook and Twitter. You can have multiple accounts on each network but only one of each can be active at a time.

The Facebook section offers extensive options with an easy to use, touch-optimized user interface. Posting a status update is simple as is attaching a photo or video (or shooting new ones on the spot) as well as adding geo-tagging information.

Facebook integration is pretty extensive

Twitter is accessed through a similarly easy interface. There's a handy button to shorten links and you can attach photos and videos to your tweets as well.

Twitter integration is great too

The text input field for status updates for both Facebook and Twitter covers only the top half of the screen and the portrait QWERTY fits snugly on the bottom half of the screen, which is pretty clever positioning.

A cool feature is the All Activity section that becomes available when you add both Facebook and Twitter accounts. It pools status updates from both networks into a single list. You can also post a status update on both networks simultaneously from here. Unfortunately, there's no option to post only to one of the networks - you have to go to the networks specific section to do that.

The Social app pools all status updates into the All Activity section

Friend search also becomes available on both networks - it searches both accounts for a given name.

Ovi Store could use more apps on its shelves

Symbian is still one of the most popular smartphone OSes in the world but its application store is pretty barren compared to the two juggernauts, the iOS App Store and Android's Market.

The company has refreshed their Ovi store interface to make it more user-friendly for Symbian^3 and it's what you get on Anna too. And while the UI is indeed very handy to use, the number of apps is somewhat of a problem.

Symbian Anna borrows the Ovi store from Symbian^3

The default screen shows a list of featured apps or you can browse the apps available in the Ovi Store by categories – Applications, Games, Audio and Video content, Personalization; or by collections – Summer Gift of Games, Chat Collection, Apps Start Kit, Travel, Tools for Professionals and Apps for Kids are the collections available at the time of this writing.

The number of apps is increasing too

Your account profile keeps record of all the apps you have installed under My stuff. You can now also select where games and apps should be installed and where audio and video should go. That’s nice – we wish Android had that right from the start.