What's in a name?

Everything it seems.

My real name, for example is, Anna Katherina Moran. Now, when people who know me discover this, they say that the name either is a great fit for me or others say it just doesn’t fit me. People can be so strange.

But, for most folk I am everything a Kathy should be… what that is, I will have to ask them.

All I know is that many people have wanted to change their parents because they were given names that they didn’t really like.

In the olden days it was not strange for people to have names that were lifted straight from a Catholic calendar. So, if you were born on a day when a saint with a not-too-nice name was being remembered, chances are you got that name.

That’s all in the past now. The younger folk give so much more thought to the names they give their kids, maybe hoping that they will grow up to be just like their namesakes.

And then there are cellphones. The name makes the cellphone, it seems. Really now, what hip and cool person would use a cellphone with a name like C20000000? Not me.

The Supernova fashion phone series of Nokia was launched in Moscow. I was told that it is the high priority that Nokia gives to the Russian market that has made Russia the traditional place for presentations of new fashion cellphones. For instance, the top-ranking 8800 model enjoyed a very high demand there, and was even issued in a black version especially for the Russian market. Nokia’s love of Russia isn’t limited only to fashion phones, though; the recent N82 also began selling in Russia first. 

And there is the name.

Wikipedia defines “Supernova as a stellar explosion. These explosions are extremely luminous and cause a burst of radiation that often briefly outshines an entire galaxy before fading from view over several weeks or months. During this short interval, a supernova can radiate as much energy as the Sun could emit over its life span.

“On average, supernovae occur about once every 50 years in a galaxy the size of the Milky Way and once every second somewhere in the universe. They play a significant role in enriching the interstellar medium with heavy elements.

“Nova (plural novae) means new in Latin, referring to what appears to be a very bright new star shining in the celestial sphere; the prefix super — involves a star increasing in brightness, though to a lesser extent and through a different mechanism.”

Ahhh, the Nokia 7610 Supernova is everything that is bright, shiny and different. Maybe I should also add that it has a look and feel that I haven’t seen or touched in quite some time.

Don’t you just love it when the stars are out at night and we watch them shine. And, so it is with the Nokia 7610 Supernova.

The Nokia 7610 Supernova isn’t a smartphone, yet for a cellphone it displays a very high level of functionality. It’s a slider equipped with a 3.2-megapixel camera.

The Nokia 7610 Supernova seems to be targeted for the user who looks for a phone that works well for the basic things like calling, texting and taking photos, can be stylized according to taste, and has special ringtones to boot. 

I really like the Theme Colorize function, which allows me to quickly swap interface, colors in so many funky ways.

I have a feeling that this phone was made with the female users in mind — with all the cute and colorful features it has, any gal would fall for it.

As far as I can see, the Nokia 7610 Supernova stands for fashion and fashion that is to come as far as cellphones are concerned.

It’s in the design

Nokia 7610 Supernova is a mid-sized, lightweight slider, entirely made of plastic. Two color versions are available — the dark and the bright ones, each coming with two changeable panels. The dark variant comes with blue and turquoise panels, the bright — with blue and red ones. These Xpress-on panels, a standard element of design customization, which has been used by Nokia in a number of earlier products. Theme Colorizer is the company’s next move catering to the younger tastes. And might I add, the young at heart tastes, too. It changes the splash screen and Navi backlight to match a specified color.

An Xpress-on panel feels like rubber when you touch it. To be more precise it sports an actual thin rubber coating, which will never let the handset slip out of the hand. Bright-colored, star-shaped stickers are supplied. 

The 7610 feels so good when held, with every aspect of shape, size and weight balanced well. From the point of ergonomics, the handset is close to ideal yet not ideal. The keypad lacks any bump marks though the buttons are well segmented, have a sufficient move. The backlight is of white color; it’s very even and neither too bright nor too dim. The main block of controls has a couple of buttons for dial and application actions, which are not everyone’s cup of tea. In practice though the navigation is pretty easy.

Color my day

Here’s how the Colorize Theme works. The right virtual button on the main screen conjures up the primary menu of the application. For a couple of seconds, you see a splash screen which can be skipped by pressing OK when it appears but can’t be totally gotten rid of in the options.

After that, you find yourself with a viewfinder window and a semi-circular palette displaying different shades of the currently selected color — a total of 16. This is done dynamically, so you don’t have to press the shoot button each time you want to update this palette.

Once you have captured the required colors, a second push of the shoot button confirms the choice, after which you are prompted to select one of the three effects: Soundflora, Waves, Globetrotter. Keeping the chosen palette intact, each of this effect mixes the colors in a unique way.

While I play around with this function I was happy that the application never lagged during data processing.

I asked a guy friend of mine to try out the function and he spent five minutes with it — that was it. For me, I had lots of fun toying around, trying to find color matches for their latest wardrobe additions.

But the backlight color of the navigation button affects not only the menus and the main screen as well. 

The 7610 has the great standards that Nokia is known for. Nokia 7610 Supernova is equipped with a QVGA TFT screen (320 x 240), which is typical for this product class; the diagonal is a bit shorter than one would want — 2.2’’. The color palette is 16M. In real life, the screen image looks very pleasing — with good contrast, bright and vivid colors. The view angles are just perfect. 

A cellphone for every user — that seems to be Nokia’s strongest rallying point. This time around the Nokia 7610 Supernova doesn’t disappoint.

I love special themes, the more colorful the better. They match my many changing moods. I love the ringtones; these match the themes and my moods, too.

I love color — what would the world be without it?