Review by Marvi Torres
This phone is pretty. Really pretty. It's a candy-bar phone with soft edges, gold trimmings, leather backing, and a metal plate with art deco embellishments that frame the 65K-color screen. The Nokia 7360 is as flashy as you can get with a mobile phone, and yet the design is done with classy restraint so as not to blind eyes with its shininess. Most of the finish is matte or a dulled metallic hue. Some people say it looks too sepia; and that works just well for me. I can imagine our Spanish mestizos and mestizas toting one of these in the cobbled streets of Malolos on fine Sunday mornings. Besides, it's always a good thing to be able to say that your phone's the color of coffee brown or warm amber. Can you find that on the label of one of your crayons?
The keys and controls are adorable as well, but I know most people will disagree (Most People, maybe you have big hands). The keypad has a sort of relief effect on the outer rim and in the middle. The second key, for example, has the upper portion raised and the lower part, level. The advantage of this design is that you can differentiate each key without looking - definitely a plus for all kitikitexts out there. Or those with small fingers, at least.
Oh, and there's a tag on the side of it that looks (and functions) much like the tag on designer jeans. It's a signature of sorts - interesting but useless. I like it.
Features-wise, there's really nothing new about the 7360. And that's not really bad considering that the main selling point of this phone is its looks. It's as comfortable to use as any Nokia phone. It's got an instinctive, straightforward menu, and you can always find what you're looking for even without the help of a manual.
SMS, MMS, and audio messaging are available functions of this phone. You can also send flash messages, which are messages that appear onscreen as soon as the recipient gets them. These messages are not automatically saved. I don't know what the practical application of this function is, but it's kinda cool. I can send random messages to my friends, and they ask how I do that. And I say it's from the 7360.
I was very disappointed to find only a VGA camera on such a pretty phone, but this one's the least expensive of the three l'Amour fashion phones anyway. The camera does good work, surprisingly. It takes a while before I hear the camera click, but hey, beauty requires some sacrifices. The night mode is excellent and defines the images well in the dark. The 7360 captures videos too, and they're not disappointing for the phone's specifications. The FM tuner doesn't work without the included headset because the headset serves as the antenna. Additional pluses include: WAP 2.0, elegant wallpapers and screensavers, organizer, and polyphonic and MP3 tones. The battery life is excellent - which means that for a charging time of around two hours, I get three to four days of power. And I use my phone a lot.
The features of this phone are quite limited, so there's not much more to talk about. There's no Bluetooth, and I hate that because it's far from fashionable to point the infrared port at another phone's port and wait until the transfer's done. On second thought, that might have been flirty had the parasol-carrying women of Malolos used this phone circa 1800s.
GRINS
? elegant form and definitely with wow factor
? comfortable grip due to the leather portion at the back plate
? comfortable navigation and features
? VGA camera is good
? battery life is very good
GRIMACES
? not a lot of new features
THE LOWDOWN
When they said fashion phone, they meant fashion phone. And art deco.
