Nokia E72 smartphone [printer-friendly] • reghardware

Original URL: http://www.reghardware.com/2009/11/25/review_phone_nokia_e72_smartphone/

Nokia E72 smartphone

BlackBerry liquidiser?

25th November 2009 13:02 GMT

Review The E72 is the latest in Nokia’s line of Qwerty handsets, beefing up the popular E71 [1] with a slightly sleeker look, improved software and some interface tweaks. It’s very slim – only just over 1cm thick, 58.3mm wide, and 114 tall, weighing 128g. The 2.36in screen is only QVGA, though arguably on a unit this size, a higher resolution wouldn’t make much difference.

Fast talker: Nokia's E72

Below the screen are two soft keys, call and end buttons, plus four dedicated buttons. The home/menu key can’t be reassigned, but the others can, with one function for a short push, and one for a long one. By default, for example, pressing the calendar button briefly shows the calendar, while a long press creates a new entry.

Between these is the Navikey, a standard looking four-way navpad. However, it’s not entirely standard, as it has an optical sensor as well. So, you can scroll through menus and lists by wiping a finger or thumb over it, which makes for much faster navigation – although some third party apps did seem to be a little confused by it at times. On the whole, it works well, and is a good improvement.

In applications like the web browser – which supports Flash, and had no problems with our various test pages – it makes navigating much simpler; a small mouse pointer appears and you can scoot round quite quickly. On the home screen, missed call, email or text notifications appear at the bottom; hover over the icon, and you see a pop-up with more information, and you can go directly to a specific SMS, for example.

The main keypad itself is quite small, but the keys are domed and feel responsive. It’s simple to get up to a reasonable speed, and key punctuation can be entered without having to mess around using modifier keys. One of those doubles up with a long press to toggle Bluetooth on and off, and another for silent mode.

Besides Nokia’s mains adapter, USB charging is an option

Call quality is clear, and we had no problems with signal, nor with setting up VoIP – though as with other recent Nokia phones, you need to download the SIP Settings application. Once that’s done, you can select ‘Internet call’ from an address book entry, or just dial a number and press the right soft key. It works well, and it’s good to see it integrated with contacts, though configuring SIP can be a bit tricky for novices.

If you’re used to Nokia’s N series phones, like the N95, the E series improves on those models in various ways. For instance, you can find a contact by starting to enter the name on the keypad. A list of matches appears, which you can scroll through to select. Scrolling right from a contact with the navpad pops up a menu with options like Call, Internet call, Send message, Send meeting request, and so on.

The ‘Navikey’ is more than a navpad and responds to swipe motions

The calendar app has more views, including daily and weekly ones, though lacks categories, which is an enduring annoyance with Symbian. There’s a good selection of tools included, like the full editing version of QuickOffice (but not the most recent, though that is a free upgrade), so you can edit Word and Excel documents, as well as Adobe Reader LE. While we could persuade Nokia’s own apps to print wirelessly, alas, we couldn’t manage the same with QuickOffice.

The ‘Multiscanner’ app is surprisingly effective; point the phone at a business card, press the button and it’ll take a photo and then run OCR, saving the card directly as a contact. There’s also a general OCR mode, which will doubtless be useful for corporate espionage.

Nokia makes much of the lifetime Messaging subscription, which gives you ‘push e-mail,’ complete with homescreen notifications. If you’re a light to moderate email user, it’s ok – but you have to set up your e-mail accounts on a Nokia server, and choose which folders you want synchronised.

There’s a limit of ten folders per email account, and old messages won’t be picked up – folders don’t even appear unless there’s a recent message in them. Serious e-mail users will still probably want to invest in ProfiMail for full, unfettered IMAP access, though Messaging does at least include support for Exchange and Notes.

The camera software features optical character recognition (OCR)

Also included are a multi-lingual dictionary, VPN support, Psiloc’s World Traveller, which gives you weather and currency information, and WiPresenter, as well as the usual Series 60 Feature Pack 2 things you’d expect, such as WebDav remote file access, which connected to our iDisk without problems.

Sample Shots

Click for a full-resolution image [2]

Click for a full-resolution image [3]

Click for a full-resolution image [4]

Click for a full-resolution image [5]

Photo with flash
Click for a full-resolution image [6]

Unusually for an E series device, there’s a good range of media features, including music player, photo gallery and Nokia’s ‘Home Network’ functions, for accessing UPnP media. The camera is backed up by a photo editor, so you can make simple changes to pictures, and upload them directly to a selection of online services.

The back panel speaker isn’t too painful and sounds better face down on a surface

There’s an FM radio too, which uses the earpiece as an antenna, but the podcasting and Internet radio apps are absent. We added the latter easily – download the version for the 6210 Navigator – and it integrates with the main radio application. The built in speaker is mono only, and somewhat lacking in bass, but it’s clear, and fairly loud. In fact, it sounds at its best when the phone’s put down; the raised camera surround allows the rear-facing speaker to bounce its sound off the surface.

Though the camera on the E72 is 5Mp, there’s no fancy Carl Zeiss lens, as found on the N series, and the flash is a single LED. Also included is a front facing camera that allows video calls. Video capture is only 15fps, at up to VGA resolution, so it’s not aimed at more than casual capture really. As the sample photos show, it’s not as good a camera as you’d find on a more multimedia-orientated phone, but we’ve seen worse; the close-up of a leaf shows good colours, but using the zoom starts to show up the camera’s limitations.

With quad band GSM, 3G, HDSPA up to 10.2MBps, Bluetooth 2 and 802.11g with WPA, about the only connectivity option missing is infrared. You can sync over the air using SyncML to websites like Mobical.net, and Nokia’s PC Suite is supplied on the phone’s memory card. A plug-in for iSync is available on the Nokia website, and the E72 works with Multimedia Transfer and Map Loader, too, so Apple users aren’t left out in the cold.

There are, too, some quite nice little touches, that make the E72 feel polished. Flip the phone over, for example, and an incoming call will be silenced, or an alarm set to snooze. Hold down the centre of the navpad when the keypad is locked, and the screen lights up displaying the current time in large letters. A long press of the space key switches the LED flash on as a torch.

Press the space bar for a short while and the flash becomes a torch

As with the E71, there’s a ‘mode’ option too, which gives you two home screens, each of which can have a different theme, different notification options and application icons, so you can switch to ‘personal’ mode at the end of the day, for example, though it’s a pity you can’t switch profiles with modes, to ignore business calls, for example. Besides the lifetime Nokia Messaging subscription, there’s walk navigation included, and 10 trial days of drive navigation as well.

Nokia’s still using a 2mm connector to charge the E72 – but the good news is that it will also charge using the micro-USB connector, albeit not as quickly. In our first tests, the battery lasted two days initially, though that was with a lot of software installation, plenty of Bluetooth transfers and concerted testing of all the features.

No touchscreen, but is versatile and responds swiftly

In more normal use, a day and a half including maps usage, calls, e-mails, Wi-Fi and photography saw a drop from full to around two thirds – which is not surprising, given the large 1500mAh battery. There’s a power-saving mode, too, which should eke things out even more. With this mode turned on – after the display showed we were down to one bar – we managed a total of 75 hours before needing a recharge.

It’s fashionable in some quarters to knock Nokia and Symbian, but when it comes to producing a business phone, they can still show some of the competition a thing or two. The E72 is compact, feels solidly built, and responds fast to commands.

Verdict

It may not have all the high-end multimedia features of some handsets, but the E72 does offer excellent battery life, good call quality, proper integration of VoIP, reasonable diary and office features, and a decent keyboard. If those are more important to you than the latest touch screen loveliness, then the E72 is definitely worth a serious look. ®