Nokia 7380

The fashion-conscious say neutral colors are in this year. The tech-savvy say 2-megapixel camera phones with Bluetooth are all the rage. Put the two together and you get the Nokia 7380, the sophisticated nightclubber's phone for 2006.

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The 7380 is an update to the radical 7280; the two form a unique line of fashion-accessory phones for the U.S. Designed without keypads and a little awkward to use, they're supposed to be second phones that you take out after the workday is over. Think of them as the perfect accessory for a dress by geek-fashion princess Diana Eng.

There's no way to tell that the 7380 is a phone at first glance. It's a keypadless and apparently screenless rectangle; the front is mostly a mirror, with a single glowing, jeweled button surrounded by a subtle rubberized scroll wheel. A bit of etched accenting softens the mirror's face. Flip it over and the back is mostly real leather, interrupted by the camera lens and flash. As on the 7280, a fabric tag juts out of the side, blurring the lines between phone and clothing.

Drop your T-Mobile SIM card into a silver door on the side, hold down a button at one corner of the scroll wheel, and a sharp little 208-by-104 screen lights up in the middle of the mirrored area. (As a 900/1800/1900-MHz worldphone, the 7380 will work well with T-Mobile, but not as well with Cingular, which uses an 850-MHz frequency band in many U.S. cities.)

So how do you dial something without a keypad? You can download your contacts from your PC to the phone using Nokia's free PC Suite software and a Bluetooth connection (as there's no USB port), then spin through your contact list using the scroll wheel. You can pick out numbers painstakingly by scrolling through individual digits. Or you can use Nokia's speaker-independent voice dialing. It's a step above the 7280's trained-voice-tag method, but the phone had trouble understanding some of our commands, and, most annoyingly, there's no way to dial specific digits by voice. Nokia should adopt or learn from the superior VoiceSignal system on phones like the Motorola RAZR V3c.

The phone's speaker is fine, the speakerphone is decent, and the little candy bar is surprisingly comfortable to hold up to your head. But the 7380 shines brightest when used with a Bluetooth headset. We got excellent results with the Plantronics Voyager 510. Reception seemed to be pretty good; but our tests showed nothing remarkable.

Sending and receiving SMS on the 7380 is much like it is on the 7280. To write messages, you scroll through letters of the alphabet with the scroll wheel, which isn't as painful as it sounds because a predictive-text system always shows the most likely letters you'll need next. Still, this isn't a phone for anyone who wants to text more than a few occasional words.

Battery life was poor, which we expected from the meager 700-mAh battery: We got 4 hours, 5 minutes of talk time. But that's fine, given this phone's limited intended use. It will last through your night on the town and help you get a taxi the next morning.— Continue Reading