Nokia 7205 Intrigue

The Nokia 7205 Intrigue sports an attractive and well-built clamshell design with a glossy black finish and silver highlights (it also comes in pink with a flower-shaped D-pad). While reviewers praise its looks, as MobileBurn.com's Ricky Cadden puts it, the phone "manages to store every single fingerprint that gets near it, annoyingly." It features a monochrome 1.9-inch OLED display on its exterior, which blends seamlessly with the black casing when not lit; the Intrigue also has a conventional 2.2-inch LCD on the inside for most phone functions.

On the whole, reviewers say the calling functions on the Intrigue are quite good, although praise is not unanimous. While most describe call quality as clear, some report distortion; most testers get good reception, though some report seeing fewer bars than on other phones on the same network, such as the Samsung Knack SCH-U310 (*Est. free with new contract). CNET's Kent German describes calls as "metallic-sounding with a hint of static." Reviewers do agree that battery life on the Intrigue is quite good, averaging around five hours of continuous talk time, well over Nokia's rated time. Laptop Magazine finds overall battery rundown time to be impressive as well. "After placing a few calls, downloading a song, streaming some video clips, and using the Web browser -- and then leaving the phone on overnight -- we were down to three out of four bars of battery life," Dana Wollman reports. Critics also say the 2-megapixel camera (with flash) performs above their expectations, yielding "bright and colorful" shots, especially outdoors.

Reviewers tend to agree that the Intrigue's other features leave something to be desired, however. The music player is criticized as being too basic, and the phone has a non-standard 2.5 mm headphone jack -- an adapter must be purchased to use standard headphones. The Intrigue does support stereo Bluetooth, though. Video streaming is described as fuzzy. Some reviewers find the menus hard to navigate. While the Intrigue features the standard Verizon interface, users have the option of using the Habitat interface, which assigns animal icons to recent callers for easy sorting. While most reviewers like the aesthetics of the Habitat menus, they say it could be seen as gimmicky, especially since it is not particularly well integrated. Web browsing is also a disappointment. PCMag.com's Jamie Lendino notes that the Intrigue has some environmentally friendly touches, like an energy-saving charger and fully recyclable packaging.