The Nokia Astound is an amazing value for money. A well-built cell phone with an 8-megapixel camera for only $79.99 after rebates with a $10 data plan is a real prize. Even better, if you pay full price ($299.99) for the Astound, you don't need a monthly data plan at all. Just don't think of this as a smartphone, or you'll be frustrated—think of it as one of the best feature phones ever.
Physical Design, Call Quality, and Internet Connection
Nokia makes beautiful hardware, and the Astound is gorgeous. It's made of smooth metal, classy plastic, and expensive-looking glass, and has a bit of the air of a fashion object. At 4.6 ounces it's solid but not too heavy, and at a well-rounded 4.6 by 2.2 by 0.4 inches (HWD) it fits very easily in your hand.
The 3.5-inch, 640-by-360 touch screen looks a little bit dim indoors, but works unusually well outdoors in sunlight. On the right-hand side of the handset, there's a useful hardware lock switch, a dedicated Camera button, and Volume buttons. The Astound feels like a $180 phone, not an $80 one.
There's no physical keyboard, so to enter text and numbers you need to use the two touch keyboards. Neither is as good as the touch keyboards on the top touch-screen phones. The portrait-style keyboard has insanely small keys, but it's fine if you have precise fingers. The landscape keyboard is more usable, but it takes over the entire screen so you can't see the box you're typing into. Both keyboards are significantly enhanced if you turn on Swype, which lets you drag your finger across the keyboard without hunting and tapping.
Specifications
- Service Provider
- T-Mobile
- Operating System
- Symbian OS
- Screen Size
- 3.5 inches
- Screen Details
- 640-by-360, 16.7m-color TFT LCD screen
- Camera
- Yes
- Network
- GSM, UMTS
- Bands
- 850, 900, 1800, 1900, 2100, 1700
- High-Speed Data
- GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, HSDPA
Reception is good; call quality is excellent. The Astound's earpiece and speakerphone both deliver top-notch sound: loud, clear and rich. The microphone lets through quite a lot of background noise, but it doesn't overwhelm voices. Battery life was acceptable, if not terrific at 5 hours and 3 minutes of talk time.
The phone paired easily with my Aliph Jawbone Era Bluetooth headset ($129.99, 4.5 stars), but voice dialing was frustratingly inaccurate in my tests. While I could trigger it with the headset, I couldn't make it connect any calls properly.
Happily, T-Mobile's Wi-Fi calling feature is supported here. This makes the Astound a great phone for international travel, as you can save big bucks by turning off roaming and using Wi-Fi hotspots to make your calls.
OS, Apps, and Weird Features
The Astound runs the latest version of the Symbian^3 OS, which Nokia aims to essentially abandon in favor of Windows Phone 7 within the next few years. The company has sketched out some upcoming software updates and insists that development goes on, but it's hard to reconcile "we're abandoning this OS!" with "we're as passionate about it as ever!"
This version of Symbian is faster and more responsive than the sluggish software on Nokia's N8, but it still had trouble registering some touches and would occasionally throw up a perplexing error like "Out of Memory" or ask "End packet data connection Web2Go?" A few times it locked up and needed a reboot.
Symbian^3 has some good features, most notably excellent multitasking, but I find it more difficult to use than other smartphone OSes; the menu layout just isn't intuitive for people who don't already have Symbian phones. Several times reviewing Symbian phones, I've needed help figuring out how to do basic tasks, like replace home screen widgets or make the mapping program create a route between two points. I'm not a cell phone or smartphone beginner. If you aren't familiar with Symbian (as most Americans aren't) you'll find the lessons you've brought over from other devices may not be useful here.
The three home screens come pre-loaded with useful widgets displaying your e-mail, calendar, and social-networking updates. You can download more widgets from Nokia's Ovi Store.
The Web browser supports pinch-to-zoom and displays desktop Web pages accurately. It supports multiple windows and RSS feeds. But it's slow; timed on several popular Web pages using the same Wi-Fi network, the Editors' Choice T-Mobile MyTouch 4G ($199, 4.5 stars) loaded pages up to twice as fast.
Nokia piles in excellent texting, e-mail, Twitter, and Facebook support, and you get third-party Twitter and IM clients that are even better than the built-in software. E-mail syncs with Microsoft Exchange, Gmail, Yahoo, and other services, including full HTML messages and viewing attachments through the built-in Microsoft Office and PDF viewers.
There are two GPS apps: T-Mobile's $9.99-a-month TeleNav GPS Navigator and Nokia's free Ovi Maps. Ovi Maps looks great, and offers walking or driving directions with live traffic support. TeleNav lets you speak your starting and ending locations. Ovi Maps locked into my location quickly and offered accurate walking directions to a local restaurant.Nokia's Ovi Store has come a long way since I tried it on the N8, but it's a declining platform. There are good apps here, but don't hope for many more in the future—and don't expect the selection of apps for the Astound to ever measure up to any Android phone. That said, the apps here are a real step ahead of what you'd see on feature phones. I downloaded Angry Birds and the Kayak travel app without a problem.
Hard-core local Microsoft Outlook users will be thrilled to see that the Astound syncs locally with Outlook via Nokia's Ovi Suite—something no Android phone can consistently do.
Buried deep within the Astound's menus are a bewildering array of incomprehensible, high-tech features. Start with NFC. This is the second U.S. phone (after the Samsung Nexus S) to include the highly buzzed-about wireless payment technology. Alas, currently, there's nothing to use it for. There's also a "video sharing" system that T-Mobile hasn't implemented, access to Web-based file sharing, and intranet support, none of which I could figure out how to configure.
Multimedia
The 8-megapixel camera is a terrific value for the price, as long as you're primarily taking outdoor shots. It's extremely fast, with very little shutter delay, and outdoors images had good sharpness and color balance. Indoors in low light, though, the Astound showed occasional motion blur and some trouble focusing on close-in objects. The dual-LED flash helped, but it gave photos a distinct bluish cast. Even with the indoor photo issues, this is by far the best cell-phone camera you're going to get for the price.The Astound also supports 720p HD video recording at 25 frames per second. I found those videos to be a little jerky, but I was very happy with the smooth, bright quality of 640-by-480 videos recorded at 29 frames per second, both indoors and out.
An excellent music and video player, the Astound comes with 8GB of on-board memory, as well as an empty memory card slot under the battery that worked fine with my 32GB card. You can drag and drop files onto the phone or sync them with Nokia's Ovi Suite software. The Astound supported all of my unprotected music files, with the exception of the OGG format, and most video formats up to 720p resolution, including XVID and DIVX in standard-def resolution.
A built-in Slacker client does well for streaming Web radio, but streaming video isn't so great. I found YouTube videos looked pixelated without support for HQ mode, and there's no T-Mobile TV, Netflix, or Hulu client. Instead you get SPB TV and Mundu TV, which in typical Nokia style deliver a lot of foreign content but not big-name American entertainment.
Music and video played well over both wired and Bluetooth headphones. But if you don't have headphones, don't worry. The Astound has a built-in FM transmitter! The music player will connect to any FM radio—I used it with a Zune HD—and play slightly scratchy but listenable sound. For radios that show song information, it creates a fake radio station ("KAAA") and transmits the song names. This is a great feature for listening in your car.
Conclusions
If you're looking for a top-notch camera and music phone on T-Mobile, the Nokia Astound fills the bill. It's far superior to other touch screen, feature phones like the Samsung Highlight (Free, 3 stars). And if you're not heavily interested in the Web and apps, it's a better buy than many low-end Android smartphones. But we're in an app world now. For roughly the same price, the LG Optimus T ($39.99, 4 stars) and the Motorola Defy ($99.99, 4 stars) may lack the 8-megapixel camera and local Outlook syncing, but they both give you access to the vast and dynamic world of Android apps, while the HTC HD7 ($99.99, 3.5 stars) delivers Nokia's new platform of choice, Windows Phone 7. All of those phones are likely to get exciting new apps more quickly than Symbian^3 will. The Nokia Astound offers handsome hardware at a great price. And while its unusual (for the USA) OS is firmly out of the mainstream, I think the Astound find a home with some mobile shutterbugs.
Benchmarks
Continuous talk time: 5 hours 3 minutes
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