Why I bought this phone: When this phone was initially introduced, it was the first Nokia phone with a covered keypad and camera. I can’t remember which phone was the first camera phone from Nokia so it might even be this one.

Soon after Nokia introduced this phone, they introduced the Nokia 3650 which looked nothing like the 7650 as the 3650 had a round bottom and the numbers were in a circle. The 3650, however, had interchangeable covers which meant it was more desirable to the teenagers. The 3650 also had the ability to shoot video. On the inside, there was no difference between the 7650 and the 3650. This put Nokia in a difficult position. Nokia, in my opinion, handled it very well and allowed anyone with a 7650 to download the video app. This leads me onto a point I would like to spread far and wide - Nokia had downloadable app’s! (Before Ovistore) I have heard it say that a phone is a smart phone if it has the ability to download app’s. If this is the case, this was my first smart phone.

This is the first phone I owned that had a proximity sensor. This was used to dim the screen when it was next to your ear.

Usability: Very good. It had the right number of keys needed. One thing to keep in mind is that this phone was not a touch screen. It was not before touch screens - I’ll go into that when I talk about my Palm Pre. The operating system had advanced quite a lot since the 7110. This phone could run programmes in the background and had a function similar to alt+tab in Windows.

Negatives: I tried to get a leather case for this phone. As you can probably guess from the photo above, this would be quite difficult. I managed to get a case but had to take the case off whenever I wanted to text or use the keypad for any reason. 

The main tool to navigate around the menu system (with icons in this version) was the joystick on the front. It was an interesting idea but unfortunately not the best idea. Blackberrys at the time had a scroller on the side that worked in a similar fashion to the roller on the 7110. Blackberrys then graduated onto a rollerball when they started to use icons. Blackberry’s rollerball and the 7650’s joystick suffered from attracting dirt. Blackberry have finally developed an optical trackpad - similar to turning an optical mouse upside down. So this leads me onto its biggest negative.

It was far too ahead of its time. This phone had a large screen and web browser making it ideal for the 3G age which came a couple of years after this was released. There was not a optical trackpad developed for phones so this phone had to make do with a joystick. I do believe that if this phone had an optical trackpad instead of the joystick, Wi-fi and a 3G antenna it could do well in today’s (2012) market. Oh and also improve the bluetooth. While it did have bluetooth, it could not support audio over bluetooth.