Nokia E7

Page 1: Intro; Features; Productivity

It has been a long wait for the Nokia E7, the equivalent of the Nokia N8 but on the business side of things. The Nokia E7 has been designed and decked with features to attract users looking out for the next big productivity smartphone and on paper at least, the E7 looks like it should deliver the results. Let's see if that translates to real-world performance.

Features

As befits a smartphone of its price, the Nokia E7 is packed to the gills with features. It has the largest display yet on a Nokia smartphone (on par with the E90 Communicator) at 4-inches with 360x640 resolution and 16M color output. This isn't an ordinary screen though and uses both AMOLED and Nokia's own ClearBlack display technologies. The E7's 680MHz ARM11 processor packs less power than what other high-end smartphones offer (although I was told by Nokia during a meet that the E7 was powered by a 1GHz processor) but it has sufficiently large amount of internal memory at 16GB (which is fortunate since the E7 doesn't support external memory cards). The E7 also has 256MB of RAM and graphics are handled by a Broadcom BCM2727 GPU.

If the E7 was to be judged on its looks and build quality alone, it would find itself on top of the smartphone hierarchy.

Like the N8, the E7 takes multimedia seriously and as a result comes with an 8MP (fixed focus) camera with a dual-LED flash that's capable of shooting 720p HD videos. There's also a VGA front camera for video calling or self portraits.


The front camera in action.

Connectivity is taken care of by Wi-Fi and 3G support (HSDPA 10.2 Mbps; HSUPA 2Mbps). The E7 can also be used as a GPS navigator thanks to its built-in GPS chip and the excellent free Ovi Maps. Like the N8, the E7 also offers HDMI out, letting you output HD videos directly to your HDTV; and USB-On-the-Go, that lets you directly plug external USB devices such as pen drives to the phone and access data on the phone.



The E7 runs the Symbian^3 mobile OS that you saw on the N8 as well. As a result, the E7 gets full access to the Ovi Store and all of the other Nokia Ovi services such as Ovi Mail, Ovi Music and, like I mentioned earlier, Ovi Maps. Although, Symbian (and by association) the Ovi Store seems headed towards a slow death, the app store still has some quality apps. Yes, the Ovi Store may not be able to compete with the Android Market in terms of sheer numbers, but it manages a good fight when it comes to high quality apps.

Productivity

As the newest E-series phone, the Nokia E7 has to impress with its productivity features. Fortunately, it manages to do so. The E7 lets you configure both e-mails from providers such as Yahoo and Google and your corporate e-mail through Microsoft Exchange. Both work quite well and are easy to setup although I did have an issue when using the Exchange Mail service. Even after successfully configuring my e-mail account and receiving mails on the phone, the Exchange Mail app kept asking me for my password periodically which became quite annoying after the fifth time.



The E7 comes pre-installed with Quick Office which is a full-featured productivity suite that lets you create and work with Word Docs, Excel sheets and PowerPoint presentations. The E7 also comes with Adobe Reader to let you view PDF files. However, usability isn't the best when dealing with excel sheets and PDF documents; scrolling isn't responsive and for the first time during my test run of the E7, it felt like the touch accuracy failed.


Productivity apps pre-installed on the E7.

The E7's bundled hands-free headset offers very good call quality and the cable is long enough to use comfortably. The headset has built-in controls to accept/reject calls, which is great although an added volume control module would also have been well received.