There was a time when having a Nokia Communicator was the sign of a powerful businessman. The line evolved into the E series line and the newest members of the E series, Nokia E7, is now available in the market for $650 (unlocked price).
The design has been upgraded and the new phone runs on the Symbian 3 OS. But does the E7 have what it takes to compete in the market?
Size:
4.87 inches tall, 2.46 inches across and 0.54 inches thick.
Weight:
6.2 ounces
Display:
The 4 inch display screen has a 640×360 pixel resolution. While the display won’t be as sharp or defined as the qHD or retina displays, it still has good, clear results. A small downside is that the pixels are easily visible on the E7 display, reducing the smoothness of the images and text.
The highly responsive touch screen makes navigation and launching apps very easy. There are three home screens available on which widgets and shortcuts can be customized. The apps main menu is exhibited in a grid format. Compared with platforms like iOS, Android and Windows Phone, the performance of the Symbian OS still feels a bit choppy.
Text Entry:
You can use the onscreen keyboard or the physical QWERTY keyboard for text entry. You can smoothly slide the screen to the side and access the keyboard. The screen locks into place at a slight angle which makes visibility easier when using the keyboard. With good sized buttons having adequate spacing and layout, the keyboard is easy to use.
Controls and Ports:
The phone has the usual menu button, lock switch, SIM card compartment, volume/zoom button and camera key. Because the E7 doesn’t have a user-replaceable battery, the SIM card is inserted in the side port but this can be rather troublesome.
The phone has the 3.5 mm headphone jack, HDMI port and a Micro-USB port. The E7 comes with an 8 megapixel camera and dual LED flash on the back and a VGA camera on the top-left corner of the face. The phone comes with a USB cable, wired stereo earphones, HDMI cable and an AC adapter. It is available in 5 colors: silver white, blue and many more.
There was a time when having a Nokia Communicator was the sign of a powerful businessman. The line evolved into the E series line and the newest members of the E series, Nokia E7, is now available in the market for $650, the price for its Unlocked Cell Phones version.
Features:
Keeping the business users at heart, the phone offers a number of features like multiple email protocols, Cisco AnyConnect SSL VPN support , remote wipe etc. There are many business apps which come preloaded in the phone like Quickoffice suite.
Voice features like quad-band world roaming, voice dialing, text and multimedia messaging etc. are included in the E7. The phone also includes Bluetooth 3.0, Wifi, GPS and 3G support. And it supports the normal music and video formats like MP3, AAC, WMA, H.264 and MPEG-4. The phone has a 16GB internal memory but lacks the option for extension.
Performance:
The E7 call quality is satisfactory. The 680MHz ARM 11 processor and 256RAM/350MB internal memory does lead to slow behavior. The talk time is of 5 hours (3G) and 20 days of stand-by time.
Bottom Line:
It is a great piece of hardware which is being held down by its substandard software.
