Nokia E7: A great piece of hardware

With E7 Nokia has come a long way since its first Communicator launch way back in 1996. However things have not chnaged much in terms of user usability in its smartphones, though it has made a mark in overall build and design. The Nokia E7 is a marvellous piece to hold- strong, bold, stylish and thats it. Compared to its contemporaries, you'll find more user friendly and effective smartphones in the Rs 30,000 price range.

Hardware

The Nokia E7 comes with an unimpressive processor-680MHz ARM 11 CPU, a broadcom BCM2727 GPU, 256MB of RAM, and 16GB of internal mass storage. It supports quadband GSM/EDGE and pentaband 3G to support UMTS/HSPA. The Espoo based handset maker has left no stone unturned to add whatever hardware is available to be incorporated onto a smartphone-Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0, and AGPS. This communicator series device also features USB on-the-go which allows its users to use all kind of common USB devices like flash drives, hard drives, keyboards, and even optional accessories such as Nokia's own digital radio headset.

The device consists of a flattened aluminum cylinder which features a 4-inch glass-capacitive AMOLED touchscreen with 640 x 360 pixel resolution. The touch screen is covered with Gorilla glass to give the device enough strength to survive few tumbles. Its scratch proof, though Nokia fared poorly in making the screen sensitive to finger prints. The E7 has been sliced longitudinally into 2 sections to accommodate the physical keyboard. When pushed from the user's left side holding horizontally, the tilt-out display reveals the true style of the new age communicator. It looks very impressive when open, and it rests at a perfect 30 degree angle from the keyboard for a perfect typing and video watching experience. The hinge, back of the display, and base of the keyboard are all cast from a suitably light, strong alloy.

The E7 is fitted with an impressive 8 megapixel camera but without autofocus, which is fundamentally wrong. It defeats the purpose of having a good quality camera in a device with fixed focus. The EDoF (Extended Depth of Field) feature with fixed focus limits you from taking close-up snaps. However the picture quality is awesomely brilliant. On comparison, E7's video output is better than its camera output.

Software

In the era of Android and iOS, Symbian^3 looks quite antique. Except the Symbian OS is being used for a long time and users are acquainted with it, this new age communicator offers nothing new. The E7 offers a rather frustrating user experience, it hangs more often than expected for a Nokia and it hangs even when there were not many applications running in the background. Though its feels faster than older Symbian models but appears to be sluggish than its current counterparts. In terms of usability standards, it lags much behind the current heros like Android and Apple's OS. The email account configuration is pretty boring and not intuitive. Many times it fails to connect to your mail server despite of having full connectivity to the internet. However the E7 makes its mark on multitasking, it performs smoothly until it hangs.

The E7 comes with browser version 7.2 and comes preloaded with apps like National Geographic, Paramount Movie Teasers, OviMaps Challenge, Climate Mission, Psiloc World Traveler, Vlingo, CNN and E!, besides the regular apps available through Nokia Ovi.

Though the industry was eagerly awaiting the release of Nokia E7 and the TVCs had made it a media mogul, the post release scenario looked much low profile. The hype around the device subsided soon after people started using it. At the era of Androids and iOSes, the Symbian looked pretty uncompetitive. Many things have changed at Nokia since its release, the biggest could be the partnership with Microsoft and the announcement followed which said Nokia would be using Windows OS for its future high-end phones. So, is Nokia E7 bringing an end to the Symbian era in its smartphones? Not a bad thought, though.

Gyana Ranjan Swain
gyanas@cybermedia.co.in