Nokia 7380 Review

The Bottom Line
Reserved only to very stylish people. Others may prefer to get a less beautiful normal phone and hide it.
Pros
Good speakerphone and earpiece sound quality
Exceptional design
Cons
Spinner wheel makes navigation easy but text and number entry painful
zSB(3,3)
Description
Technology: GSM
No keypad, text and number entry is done using a spinner wheel.
Bluetooth support
Here is the story of a love-hate relationship. The Nokia 7380 is a phone I would have loved to love, but had to hate-love. Beautiful, no bigger than a Milky Way(tm) chocalate bar, and so relatively well balanced with a decent camera, a radio player and even Bluetooth. I'm not a refined lady -- the target market for that lipstick-shaped phone sold in Holt Renfrew luxury stores in Canada -- but people were still turning heads on me. However, using the Nokia 7380 requires skills since there is no keypad, just a spinner wheel to select numbers, a concept introduced last year in the Nokia 7280, painstaking and made necessary for style's sake. Yet, this time I kept the 7380 for more than a month and I almost grew used to it. But why didn't they include number voice dialing, a technology that has been around since 2004 and that allows, not only to dictate names but numbers.
Other than that, the Nokia 7380 is great: A crocodile skin leather back cover; The front is a full mirror that reveals the display only when you use it. The VGA camera is good and sound quality is surprisingly good enough for such a small design, both in handset and speakerphone mode. Text entry is a challenge without a keypad but the method they developped at least brings up the most likely letters first to make things faster -- but it occasionally fails. Yet, the Nokia 7380 is for people who need to be stylish at all expense. Others should choose ugly and functional regular phones.