Nokia 7205 Intrigue Review

Software / Features:

The home screen and main menu feature something new called Habitat Mode.  With it turned on, the home screen becomes interactive, with it showing icons of people who you have recently talked to.  You can press the down button on the d-pad to select the person’s icon and then toggle between the calls and messages from that person.  We enjoyed this new feature and found its layout easy to use.  The Main Menu still has the familiar Verizon categories for media center, messaging, contacts, recent calls, and settings & tools.  With the Habitat Mode turned off, you can then change the color and layout of the menus (8 colors with tab, list, and grid view) and have a personalized wallpaper on the home screen.  We like the fact that the Intrigue allows for more user customizations than most phones and hope that Nokia continues to do this with future devices.



Both the 6205 and Intrigue have the same phonebook, allowing up to 500 entries to be stored, each with their name, mobile 1, work, email 1, group, picture, ringtone, mobile 2, fax, and email 2.  We’d like to see the Intrigue store up to 1000 entries, since most other mid-level phones support this.  After a contact is saved, you can assign them to one of 999 speed-dial locations.




Since the 1.3MP camera on the 6205 didn’t do so well last year, we weren’t expecting much from the Intrigue, even though it is 2MP.  Thankfully, this is not the case; with the Intrigue taking better looking images than most other 2MP cameraphones.  Pictures taken outside have accurate color representation with good detail and white balance.  In fact, the Intrigue took better outside images than the Motorola Rapture or LG Versa.  When indoors, the picture quality on the Intrigue does goes down, but this is common with most cameraphone due to the lower light levels.  The flash on the Intrigue is brighter than the Versa, but still doesn’t illuminate a dark room enough to make much of a difference.  The only issue we had with the Intrigue’s camera was in regards to its position on the back of the phone, with our finger sometimes getting in the way.  A better location for the camera would be the font flip, as it would give your hand more room.




Music playback on the Intrigue and 6205 are identical, since both use the same player and have the speaker located on the front flip.  When the phone is closed, the external display will show the track name with a progress bar, and the touch sensitive control buttons become active.  The quality is average, with distortion being heard if there is a lot of bass or vocals.  Luckily, the Intrigue does support Stereo Bluetooth (A2DP/AVRC), unlike the 6205, which means you can enjoy better quality music on your stereo Bluetooth headset, or use wired earbuds with the 2.5mm headset jack.


Other software features include Mobile Web 2.0, Visual Voicemail, VCast Music and Video, and VZ Navigator for GPS guided directions.  You can also download a wide variety of games and other programs through Get it Now.  The browser is slightly better than the one found on the 6205, since it will load an HTML site and display is as separate pages, which allows most pictures to be shown, but in doing so you lose the original page layout.  Unfortunately, it cannot stream videos from YouTube, despite the phone supporting EVDO Rev A.  It also comes with the Dashboard software, which can show up the 13 channels of information (news, entertainment, music, games).  Additional tools include voice commands, calculator, calendar with desktop preview, 3 alarm clocks, stopwatch, world clock, and notepad.  The voice commands (powered by Nuance) worked rather well, as it would dial by number or stored contact without issue, but it does not support speech-to-text for text messaging.  The calendar is also similar to the 6205, and will allow you to type in events that you wish to be notified of.



There is a total of 169MB of internal memory, with almost 21MB used by the Intrigue out of the box.  Even though this is more internal memory than most other phones in its class, we’d still recommend a memory card for easily transferring pictures and music, even though it only supports up to 8GB.