Nokia Lumia 710, The Windows Phone that Could Change It All

Performance

In terms of performance, we were unable to find any of the applications that we’ve used in the past on Android devices to measure upload/download speeds across the network, nor testing some other aspects of the device. There are some benchmarks out there, but the Windows Phone operating system doesn’t support screenshots and you must crack the device in order to do so. We believe that this is a fundamental flaw of the operating system.

The Windows Phone Mango operating system in itself is actually a very interesting one. During our use of the device, never did it actually feel sluggish nor bogged down by multi-tasking. Windows Phone doesn’t really allow for fully fledged multi-tasking, but it does accomplish it in a manner that enables the user to maximize battery life, which we’ll be addressing in the next section.

Many reviewers have also commented on the Lumia line’s ‘poor hardware specs’ which we would have to somewhat agree with, except for the fact that this 1.4 GHz single core Snapdragon processor is more than ample performance for this device and there is absolutely no need for a dual core processor in this or any Windows Phone device at the given moment.

Battery Life

The battery life of the Lumia 710 is really what amazed us the most. We were able to get 16-17 hours on average using only 3G under normal to heavy usage. With lighter usage we were able to squeeze out between 19 and 20 hours on average. When connected to WiFi, we were able to increase that battery life to 23 to 24 hours under normal usage and under lighter usage we were able to extend that battery life to 27 hours. Over a full day.

This astonishing battery life absolutely had us sold, and should be a gigantic selling point for this smartphone and OS as it only features a 1300mAh battery which is considered relatively small for a smartphone nowadays with most smartphones coming in between 1500mAh and 1800mAh. The problem with other Nokia Lumia devices is that they feature LTE baseband chips and those baseband chips are not currently shipping in devices with 28nm (unless you go with an MSM8960 with integrated LTE baseband), which results in significantly decreased battery life. 40nm baseband chips are the reason why devices like the Lumia 900 have mediocre battery life even though the processor is essentially the same as the 710 and the only difference are the AMOLED Display and LTE capability. This shorter battery life on the Lumia 900 also is with an 1800mAh battery, which is almost 30% bigger.