Nokia E7

NOKIA E7 REVIEW

The Nokia E7 looks stunning and has one of the most comfortable Qwerty keyboards on a phone but will win few friends for its operating system.  The front is dominated by the 4 inch AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with just a single key beneath it, to serve as a waking up, menu and back button. Sliding the screen reveals one of the most spacious QWERTY keyboards seen in recent times. On the back is an 8.0-megapixel camera, but alas, no autofocus , but with a capacity to shoot HD video. The innards of the device are impressive too — a 680 Mhz processor, which is the fastest seen on an E series device, every connectivity option you can think of (HDMI, USB on The Go, as well as Bluetooth, Wi-Fi , 3G and the like), & 16 GB of non-expandable storage. While Symbian ^3 does perform admirably as compared to its predecessors , it has none of the intuitiveness and speed that one has come to expect from Android and iOS. The touchscreen is wonderfully responsive and a pleasure to use but the widgets on the three (just three!) customisable homescreens still behave erratically, refusing to update at times. You need an Ovi Account to access your Twitter and Facebook Accounts through the Social Networks app on the phone, the default Web browser remains sluggish, you are forced to update the Ovi Store when you launch it, there are fewer apps than iOS and Android, and you cannot get a full QWERTY onscreen keyboard to type in portrait mode (a shocker in a display this big). We also were surprised to see mails in our Gmail account taking significantly longer to arrive on the E7 as compared to the iPhone 3GS and BlackBerry Bold 9700 — something never seen on an E series device. Round that off with eccentricities like a firmware update that wipes out your contacts and you can see why Symbian^3 is the Achilles Heel of the E7. This is not to say that the E7 is a bad device. It has a terrific QWERTY keyboard, great display, good calling quality, and most impressive , a battery that lasts comfortably more than a day. These are offset by a mediocre OS and a camera that is frankly embarrassing (the E72 takes better snaps). One of my colleagues summed up the E7. The E7 looks gorgeous and is solidly built, but its sluggish, confusing Symbian software has been abandoned even by Nokia. Its many good points can't outweigh the fact that it's teeth-itchingly annoying to use. The Nokia E7 has some wonderful qualities, like great hardware and excellent battery life, but ultimately its inferior software trips up this business-oriented smartphone.

SPECIFICATION & FEATURES

NOKIA E7 PRICE

Price in USA $673

Price in UK £320

Price in EURO €500

Price in PAK Rs.43,850

Price in INDIA Rs.26,999