The Twist excels at messaging. The keyboard is excellent for sending a quick message. It can handle SMS, MMS, web-based email (Hotmail and AOL) and IM (MSN, Yahoo! and AOL). It also supports threaded messaging so it’s easy to keep track of conversations.

It also has an interesting interactive mode called Habitat Mode. This is a social networking interface that shows your callers as avatars on the home screen, as shown in Figure 11. You can choose between the Superworld or Urban jungle. There are about 400 avatar combinations. When in this mode, your home screen becomes interactive with the avatars of the people you recently communicated with in chronological order. Not only is it a fun home page, but it allows you to view recent calls and messages and access missed calls and messages quickly.

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Figure 11: The Habitat Mode.

The display offers a number of customization options. You can change the backlight time, the home screen font color, the menu font size, and the dialing font size.

Web browsing is only adequate. While the square screen doesn’t interfere with other phone functions, it does limit web viewing, making you scroll more than you might have to on other phones. The Twist comes with the Polaris 6.1 web browser. Although the web browser supports HTML and renders most web pages fairly accurately; it isn’t as good as Opera Mobile or the mobile Safari browsers. It is also a bit difficult to navigate Web pages. Also it doesn’t support Wi-Fi which could make surfing speedier.

Other features available on the Twist include visual voicemail which lets you view your voicemails on the screen and listen to them without dialing into your mailbox. You can also tether the Twist to use it as a modem to connect your laptop. These features, however, may incur additional Verizon charges.

Although you will have to have a stereo 2.5mm headset or an adapter that will work in stereo, the Twist, does support stereo Bluetooth with good sound quality.

The built-in media player can play music in MP3, WMA and AAC/AAC+ formats. One very nice feature is that you can listen to music while messaging or performing other tasks.

You can use the Verizon’s V CAST Music with Rhapsody on the Twist to buy songs and download them directly to your phone or via PC. However, you should be aware that V CAST and Rhapsody both carry an addition Verizon charge.

The Twist has a microSD card slot that supports SDHC cards. We used a 16GB card with excellent results.

The 3MP camera and flash are on the back, as shown in Figure 12.

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Figure 12: The back of the phone.

When the phone is open, the back also serves as a small mirror, as shown in Figure 13.

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Figure 13: The back of the open phone.

You must open the phone to use the camera. It has an auto-focus mode and a flash and can also take videos.

You can edit the pictures on the phone and create slideshows. The pictures look good for a 3 megapixel camera phone. The camera software includes adjustments for white balance, color effects, shutter sound and other settings. Although the exposure is a bit inconsistent, the pictures are generally pleasing.

You can also take videos on the Nokia Twist 7705.  Some of the videos that we took were slightly blurred. There were also occasional frame drops and refresh delays. Although the videos were quite watchable, we wouldn’t suggest this phone if you want to take a lot of videos.

The Twist also works with Verizon’s V CAST on-demand video services.

The Nokia 7705 also has built-in GPS that works with Verizon’s VZ Navigator. This is an additional cost, but works quite well. The Twist is able to give accurate turn-by-turn instructions.

The Twist uses Verizon’s User Interface. It is not a full-fledged smart phone, but it performs many smart phone tasks. You can get additional apps from Verizon, but the number and scope of the apps is limited.

This phone supports a 1,000-contact phone book with plenty of areas for things like multiple email addresses and notes for each contact. You can also save callers to groups and add a photo and ringtone for each. You can even assign friends a color for the contact ring.

The Twist also has a calculator, a calendar, an alarm clock, a stopwatch, a world clock, a notepad, a tip calculator, a unit and a currency converter. There is an additional service available to access and sync push email from corporate accounts, but we didn’t try this feature, and like some other extras, there is an additional cost involved.

Nokia rates the battery life of the Twist 7705 at 4 1/2 hours of talk time and 13 days standby time.