The Lumia 710 is the smaller brother to Nokia’s Lumia 800 and 900 models. The 710 has a lot of goodness in that small footprint. It sports a 5 megapixel camera (without the Carl Zeiss lens), a 3.7 inch touch screen, 8GB of storage, and weighs in at 125.5 grams. As well, the 710 comes loaded with the latest version of Windows Phone (7.5 / Mango). The phone is labeled as a “4G” HSPA phone with download speeds up to 14.4 Mbps.

Nokia has been having a lot of success with the Lumia line of devices. It’s nice to see Rogers offering the 710 at an affordable price. We’re working on our review now and should have more details on exactly what you can expect from the 710 in the not too distant future. In the meantime, please feel free to ask any questions you may have about the 710.

But why put down your phone and dust off your PC just to provide your suggestions about Windows Phone? You can do this right from your phone with an app called Suggestion Box. Suggestion Box allows you to view the "hot ideas", "newest", and "top ideas". You can also see any suggestions you have created and browse the entire list of suggestions by category. I had checked out the web site when it originally launched, but found it slow and awkward to navigate. The mobile app is fast and shows just what I’m interested in without any issues.

Currently, the top 2 suggestions are for adding support for Arabic and Persian. After that, you have a couple of the ones I’m backing – Custom sounds for SMS, Email, Notifications, and Enable all Bing features for non-US countries. And even a little further down the top ideas list, but still within the top 10, is my personal biggie – Screenshot support!

Microsoft can’t add that feature you so desperately want if they don’t know about it. So download the app and let them know what’s important to you.

It updates to show how many text messages you have received, as one would expect, but it also does a little more than just show the number. When there are no new text messages, the face is a standard smiley.    But get your first new text and it changes to a winky smiley.    Let the number of messages rise to 4 unread or more, and now you have a new surprise smiley.

Yes, it’s not a huge feature, but it’s a cute little extra that makes it fun to look at every day. I wonder if the smiley changes at some point after the I’ve had up to 12 messages unread and didn’t see any difference. I would be cool if it turned into a frown or something at 50.

Let’s start with how to turn on the speech feature. All you need to do, is open Settings and scroll down until you find "speech", and tap on it. This is where you can configure the speech engine for use. The first check box will enable the speech engine to work over the internet. This is important if you want to dictate text messages, as it needs to off load the processing of that audio to the powerful servers on the internet. They can rip through the audio and return accurate results quickly. If you’re are not going to send text messages, then you could leave this off. Personally, I would leave it on, even if you’re not using text messages. Who knows what other applications might start taking advantage of this in the future. It’s nice to have it on and ready, even if you never use it.

The second check box allows you to start the speech engine even if the phone is locked. This is a little confusing, as it’s not the regular screen lock that it’s talking about. It’s referring to the pin lock on the lock screen. If you have your phone protected by a pin code that has to be entered to unlock the screen, this feature will allow you to use some of the speech features even if the pin code has not been entered. However, you can’t do everything. It won’t launch applications, or search Bing. It will text your friends, or call contacts.

Turning on the Play audio confirmations feature will have the speech engine confirm things with you before taking action. For the first while, I think it’s best to use this feature. At least until you’re confident that the engine is accurate in listening to your words. I’ve been using speech for a while now, and I still have this turned on. I like having that confirmation, but that’s me.

The final option is when the speech engine should read out your text messages. By default, it’s set to Bluetooth only, but you can set this to Bluetooth and headsets, wired headsets only, always, and off. I have it set to always. When you get a text message, it will start by telling you who it’s from and ask if you want it to read the message. So you don’t have to worry that it will automatically start reading the message aloud. Also, you can quickly tap the volume button and it will cancel the speech engine. So it’s easy enough to stop if it’s not a good time to have it read out the message.

I wish that the Windows Phone team had given the speech engine a catchy name – like Apple did with Siri. Just think of how much cooler this article would have been if it was writing Jane instead of speech engine. It’s powered by Microsoft’s TellMe service, but you still can’t address it in the same way. Maybe in the future it will take on more natural feel and lose a little of the robot like instructions.

Now for some of the fun things you can do with the speech engine. I find it’s handy to use for launching FourSquare and doing quick searches on Bing. Another fun thing, is to set your buddy’s first name as "the" and last name as "devil". Then when you get a text message, your phone will say "New text message from the devil. You can say read it or ignore". Of course, you can do a lot more than just “The Devil”, but I’ll leave that up to you to play with. You can also use this service to update your Twitter status. Just make sure to setup Twitter for SMS support, then add it to your contacts, and you can now dictate your next status update!

There are a couple things you need to know before you can start loading your device with custom ringtones. First, the audio file must be 39 seconds long or less. So there’s no putting a 3 minute long clip as your ringtone. 39 seconds and then it will loop around and start over.

Next, the total size of this file must not be larger than 1MB in size. This is to ensure fast and responsive phone. If the file was too large, it could significantly slow the device as it loads when the phone rings and that’s not an experience that anyone is looking for.

Finally, the file needs to be in WMA or MP3 format, and can not have any DRM on it.

If you have a favorite song, but it’s too long, or you’re only looking for a certain part of the audio track, you can download a free tool like Audacity, and crop that song down to just the chunk you are looking for. Once you have everything the way you want it, you’re ready to copy it to the device. Here’s how you do that:

Add the audio file to your library of music and launch the Zune software. Find the track inside of the Zune client, right click the file and select edit. The only value that matters for sync’ing this to the device and making it a ringtone, is the Genre. So change the Genre to RINGTONE. Then right click the track and select Sync with device.

Basically, any audio file with a Genre of RINGTONE will be allowed to sync with the device, and it won’t show up in a playlist or while browsing the music on the device. The only place you will see this file is when you’re browsing the ringtones. To check that it sync’ed successfully to the device, you’ll want to browse to Settings / Ringtones + Sounds, and tap on Ringtone. The resulting list should be broken into 2 sections – Custom and Windows Phone. Any custom ringtones you have sync’ed to the phone will be listed under the custom section.

At this time, there is no support for custom alert or notification sounds. We’re all hopeful that this will be added in the next release. Also, there are app in the marketplace that allow you to download custom ringtones, in case you don’t want to go through the process of creating your own. Check out my review of Free Ringtones if you’re interested in going down that path instead. Or if you want to record something on the device and use that as your ringtone, check out Yivosoft Recorder.

The first hint that Nokia was looking to change things up, came when you land in McCarran International Airport. After picking up your bags and on the way to the cab line, it was pretty hard to miss the Nokia kiosk and the free ride they were offering CES attendees to select hotels. Boarding the double decker bus, they passed around some smartphones for you to check out on the drive. How cool is that?

But the promotion didn’t stop there. Each day of the show, from 8:30 – 11:00 at each of the monorail stops, Nokia had some entertainment for passengers waiting to board the train. The dancers were taking turns showing off their moves as the crowd clapped and cheered them on. What I found most interesting with this campaign, is that there was no mention of Microsoft, Windows Phone, or even a picture of the phone. Just the catch phrase “The Amazing Everyday” and the familiar square tile look. Although, the later is only familiar to those of us who have used the OS. The crowd had a great time, and many an iPhone were used to record the event. I shot this video using my Windows Phone.

Watch this video on YouTube.

Hats off to Nokia for generating some good buzz and getting into people’s heads. Let’s see if they can keep it up, and if it will pay off for them.

In the end of the 2 days, Windows Phone walked away with a pretty nice record of 30 Wins / 3 Loss / 1 Draw. The 3 losses are against an iPhone 4s, Galaxy Nexus (both on posting a picture to Twitter, and lost by a second or so), and a Droid Bionic (on sending an SMS to a friend). But to get all the details, head over to the Windows Phone YouTube channel and watch the video’s yourself. Or, if you just want the summary, the recap of Day 2 is below for your enjoyment.

Watch this video on YouTube.

The 710 with Rogers will be available in February and have a price of $49.99 with a 3 year contract. I expect the full, non-subsidized price will be $349.99, but there is no confirmation of that at this point.

If you’re not familiar with the specs of the 710 and 800 models, you can check them out here. Basically the 710 is an entry level device that offers Nokia’s exceptional quality at an affordable price. The 800 takes it up a notch by adding a more unique design, and better camera optics with the Carl Ziess lens.

At this time Nokia had nothing to say in regards to the Lumia 900 device coming to Canada. This is the device that many are after as it has a larger screen and runs on the faster LTE network. Currently that is still just coming to AT&T. However, there is hope that it will come to Rogers to offset the entry level 710 with the high end 900. Or, perhaps Bell will pick it up. Either way, if it comes to Canada it would have to be on one of the carriers that support LTE.

More details on the 900, 800 for Telus, and 710 for Rogers when they become available. 

While roaming the floor at ShowStoppers, I caught a glimpse of the kind of hardware I was hoping to see more of. Lenovo has a truly innovative design that allows you to have both a laptop and a tablet. The model I saw, I think its being referred to as “Yoga”, was just 17mm thick with a touch screen. When you’re looking to use the keyboard, just pop open the device as you normally would.

Thanks to a special dual-hinge, when you want a tablet experience, you can swing that screen back and fold it over onto itself. You’re bending the screen over so the back of the screen touches the bottom of the laptop. Once the screen goes past 180 degrees the keyboard and trackpad are automatically disabled. Now, you have a very functional tablet but without the sacrifice of leaving apps or files behind.

There will be various different configurations for Yoga, but the price is expected to start around $1200. Depending on the SSD, memory and screen size, that price will change.

Price and availability are still unknowns at this time. Given the larger screen and faster network support, I would expect this will on the more expensive side compared to the current Lumia line of devices.