After using 5800XM for an year I acquired the latest Eseries communicator flagship by Nokia, the E7.
Note: This entire post(text portion) was typed using the E7's QWERTY keypad.
Hardware&Design:
E7 is built like a tank, it has a slide-out hardware, four rows, QWERTY keypad with Chiclet style keys. The aluminium uni-body design makes it look like a premium device and feels great on your palms, all this in an amazingly slim profile. Needless to say, E7 is a beast, coming under the enterprise series it is also a capable multi-media device, a 4' inch AMOLED capacitive touch-screen with Clear Black Display(CBD), HDMI port output, 16gb mass memory, 8mp camera with dual-LED, 720p video recording and playback etc... are few note-worthy features. Under the hood you have 680Mhz ARM11 processor, Broadcom GPU and 256MB RAM out of which more than 140MB is available for the end user.Software and usability:
After using it for few weeks now it is growing on me well, I'm loving the qwerty keypad and it is my first ever phone with a qwerty keypad I've used, the experience is really great.
On the software part it runs the latest and greatest Symbian^3 OS which is a functional, capable and feature-rich OS. With live multi-tasking this aspect of Symbian phones has been taken to a new level with Symbian^3 devices.
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| Visual Multi-tasking on Symbian^3 |
Symbian^3 is a vast improvement over s60v5 a.l.a Symbian^1 especially to those early adopters of S60v5(devices like 5800XM). Symbian^3, utilising in-built GPU to the full-effect, is very responsive and applications loads faster. There are numerous tweaks done to UI to be more intuitive, as a Symbian^1 user in the past I'm finding some noticeable improvements in Symbian^3 on the whole, but on the competitive part it still lacks behind the best out there in some aspects, especially the web browser. Nokia have promised that there will be updates improving UI, fingers crossed on that.
Multi-media:
E7 is good in both media creation and consumption. Supporting wide range of audio and video formats you hardly need converter software to make it play on the device. Watching videos on the large AMOLED CB display is a true pleasure. E7 can also play 720p HD videos, provided the size of the video is less than 2GB, at present the video player doesn't support sub-titles sure Nokia can sort this through an update. Overall you've got a pocket-able movie player in your hands.
E7 has a 8megapixel fixed focus camera with dual-led flash, the technology EDoF(Extended Depth of Focus) as Nokia claims is good for point and shoot photography but with no auto-focus objects within 30cm are not in focus, in simple terms you can't take a close-up/macro shot, using E7's EDoF camera, the details become blurry. It can shoot HD(1280*720p) videos and you've got continuous auto-focus here, no matter how close you point the camera, in video mode, towards an object it is focussed. Video quality is crisp and clear and there is an additional noise-cancelling microphone at the back to producing some crisp audio too.I've added few camera samples taken with E7 in low-light and in sun light conditions.
Music player on Symbian3 devices has been improved, including eye-candy album art cover-flow. As said before Music player supports wide range of audio formats and with 16GB mass memory there is ample space for songs and videos storage. Lack of folder support and equaliser modification are the few draw-backs in the music player. Audio quality is top-notch as always with Nokia devices and the supplied WH-201 ear-phones do produce good bass at higher levels but I'm going to buy WH-701 ear-phones, which usually comes with Nseries devices, with audio controls on it . I was impressed with the quality of it when I used it before.
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Full office suite:
All Nokia Eseries devices comes with full office suite with editing functionality. E7 comes with the latest version of Quickoffice suite, with a hardware QWERTY keyboard there is no need to do your heavy typing work on your PC, slide-out the keyboard you won't feel tired of typing on this. Entire text part of this post was typed using my E7 in quickword. It also comes with a zip manager and Adobe PDF reader. Nokia have also bundled a third-party F-secure anti-theft application for device protection in case of theft, you can password protect the device, the application also sends a message to a registered mobile number if the SIM card is changed.
E-mail is the first priority when it comes to enterprise devices and the E7 delivers well here, by declining the terms and conditions of Nokia messaging you can get additional options in the e-mail client and can use the in-built client to push e-mails from any IMAP/POP servers by-passing from the Nokia servers. E-mail client display e-mail in HTML, formatted text, with attachments. Option to display images, when needed , is a nice touch too. Using Mail for Exchange application you can sync e-mails from any exchange servers. There are options to sync e-mail at custom intervals with minimum sync interval being every 5 min. Typing long e-mails, posts such as this, is a superb experience on the stellar hardware QWERTY keypad which gives nice tactile feedback. At any point of time, anywhere in the world, a hardware keypad completely trumps any on-screen QWERTY keyboard no matter how it's designed and how fluid the experience is.
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| Excellent keypad of E7. |
Features which no other mobile OS has at present:
USB-OTG(USB- On The Go) means all Symbian3 devices, including the Nokia E7, can host a USB device on it. Using the supplied USB-OTG adapter you can directly connect a pen-drive and transfer files to E7 and vice-versa, you can format your flash drive too. If that's not enough connect a USB mouse and browse the device without the touch screen, connect a USB keyboard and start typing if your fat fingers are finding difficult to type on the E7 keypad, I'm thoroughly enjoying this feature and at times boast about it.
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| 8Gb Flash drive connected to E7 showing up on the file manager. |
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| Option to format the flash drive. |
Pentaband 3G- all symbian3 devices works in almost every 3G frequency out there, buying an E7/N8/C7/C6-01 you can almost use the phone around the world, in 3G, which isn't possible with dual-band or tri-band 3G devices.
Recent firmware update:
E7 got an update recently, it got updated to V14. Update was released via FOTA to address some bug fixes and performance improvements.
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| Version 14.002 update. |
Battery life: This is one aspect always depends upon the usage limits of an individual. In case of me, where the device is connected to Internet all time pushing e-mails, refreshing twitter timeline, browing web etc well for that's what the modern devices are made for, I get only less than a day out of it. Using power-saver mode you can drag it slightly more than a day.
All that being said E7 isn't the device for all. There are few drawbacks which may turn down one's choice of E7.
No auto-foucs camera on a high-end device is a complete bummer, I felt the pinch recently when I tried to scan a bar-code using E7's camera it simply won't scan, later I used my Nokia 5800 to scan it and it scanned in seconds, the same applies for scanning some documents or text/picture on a paper.
No memory card expansion, E7 comes only with 16GB mass memory for storage, this isn't a big deal for me as 16GB is enough for my media collection. Device back-up can't be done on to the mass memory, you need to insert a flash drive if you need to have a back-up of the phone memory.
No data encryption. All Eseries devices, except E7, have got data encryption. It's been rumoured that this feature is going to come in a future firmware update.
Non-replaceable battery, no more mocking at Iphone. Any freezes you need to press the power button for 8sec to revive the device.
Final words:I would say E7 is the best ever mobile hardware made so far. Though it has its own demerits, considering what it delivers and it does I don't see them as short-comings. Also the Nokia-Microsoft partnership has dampened the expectations of this device. I'm really worried and sad that such a good, capable and feature-rich OS is counting its days. Nokia have promised to support and release devices running Symbian for an year or so. I bank my hopes on Nokia and wish they optimise Windows Phone OS to match the functionality of Symbian or even better it. If that doesn't happen then many Nokia-Symbian users may bid adieu to Nokia.
Camera samples
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| Panorama shot of NTR memorial. |
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| Low-light with Flash |
