Nokia E7 Preview

Full Review

Nokia's E7 smartphone is a throwback to the days of the Nokia Communicator, a device that was marketed as a mini computer and was one of the first smartphones to feature a full QWERTY keyboard.

The Nokia E7 has a tilting 4-inch, capacitive AMOLED touchscreen with a 640x360 (nHD) pixel resolution, along with a full, physical QWERTY keyboard and angled slider. The Nokia E7 also has an anodised aluminium enclosure that looks similar in style to the upcoming flagship N8 smartphone. The 4-inch screen is as big as the Samsung Galaxy S's  and it is one of the largest in the market just below the HTC Desire HD, HTC HD2 and HTC Evo 4G - all which come with 4.3-inch screen. For the resolution though, it is much less-packed than the rest of the phones with the similar screen size but with WVGA resolution.

The Nokia E7 is positioned as a business or corporate device and Nokia has touted "real multitasking" as one of its key features.

The Nokia E7 is positioned as a business or corporate device and Nokia has touted "real multitasking" as one of its key features. The E7 supports e-mail through Microsoft Exchange Server and ships with the full Office suite that allows the editing and reading of PowerPoint, Word and Excel documents. With this slide-out QWERTY keypad, it is a good competitor to either the Motorola Milestone or the HTC Desire Z. And comparing to these two phones, the obvious difference lies in the OS. While Nokia E7 runs on Symbian ^3, the Milestone and Desire Z are running on Android Froyo.

Other features of the Nokia E7 smartphone include an 8-megapixel camera with dual-LED flash, 720p HD video recording and 16GB of internal memory, along with a microSD card slot that will accept cards up to 32GB in size. Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and GPS connectivity are all included, while an HDMI-out port allows you to connect the E7 to a large screen television to display videos and photos.

The Nokia E7 will also ship with Nokia's Ovi Maps application which provides free full turn-by-turn navigation for the lifetime of the device.

There is no word on the pricing and availabilty yet.

Bottom Line

The Nokia E7 is a rich-featured smartphone with a slide-out QWERTY keypad. The phone will attract both the business and multimedia users, however, its new Symbian^3 OS will have to deliver in terms of usability and apps support to make the phone a success in the current market.

Check out our review/preview of the latest Nokia phones:
Nokia C6-00
Nokia X3 Touch and Type Preview
Nokia C3-01 Touch and Type Preview
Nokia N8 Preview
Nokia C6-01 Preview
Nokia C7 Preview