Nokia E5, a Consumer Review

(picture source: gsmarena.com)

One of the most recent Nokia smartphones is the Nokia E5. The Nokia E5 handset has a full Qwerty keyboard and is a follow-up of what Nokia offered with the Nokia E71 and E63 models. The Nokia E5 cell phone is especially aimed at the business user, who will also use the Nokia smartphone for personal use. That is actually a pretty logical and practically-oriented target group. A large part of business users also actively use their phone for personal use. The fact that the Nokia E5 is a business phone is noticeable right away in creating an e-mail account. The possibility of creating several (up to ten) accounts is offered, and is carried out easily.

The build is reasonably good with plastic all round except for a metal backplate which helps the handset feel solid and ought to mean it can withstand a fair few knocks and bumps.

The new Nokia E5 mobile phone supports the HSDPA network, and also has Wi-Fi. That’s handy to be able to use the local wireless network or to quickly stay up to date on the go. Speed is still a necessary factor for mobile communication. The software applications are not getting any lighter, nor are the data that are being sent back and forth. The Wi-Fi sniffer that you can place on the main screen is a plus point too. This will alert you when you are in the presence of a network, and you can hop onto it for web browsing or whatever else you fancy pretty easily. If you ever get lost, you can let the Nokia E5 smartphone take you to the right address via Ovi Maps, Nokia’s free navigation solution.

A business user is also involved in social networks such as LinkedIn. The Nokia E5 cell phone offers immediate access to the popular social media Apps, so that the most recent status of every personal or business contact can be shown. In terms of design, the Nokia E5 resembles the E71. The display is fairly small and measures 2.4-inches, but still has a good, clear display. The resolution is pretty standard with 320x240 pixels and a total of 250.000 color reproduction. You can cram a surprising amount of information into the screen including photo contacts, application shortcuts, email and calendar notifications, and lots more. There are several different screen arrangements to choose between and the whole thing is quite flexible. It provides adequate size and sharpness for most tasks such as messaging and editing short documents, though it is less than ideal for web browsing and watching movies on. Viewing angles on the phone are great and the screen is also very bright. Both these factors help make the screen more usable for long periods, and the landscape orientation lends itself to business oriented tasks (such as text entry, Bloomberg and sorting through emails).

Right under the display the buttons for the main parts such as Menu, Home and Contact are found. They are all easy enough to find and hit –Nokia has designed this area of the E5 with plenty of space. And if you long press the messaging button you go right into the SMS creation screen, while long pressing on the Home button gives you a quick way to switch between open apps.

The Qwerty keyboard can be controlled easily, which is an immediate advantage for typing longer messages. It is well made and easy to use at a fair old speed. You may find that if you’ve larger hands it is a bit of a squeeze to use comfortably, but that can be said of all mini Qwerty keyboards like this.

Music playback benefits from a top mounted 3.5mm headset jack, equaliser and FM radio, but you’ve only got 256MB of built in memory to fill with tunes, so you’ll probably need to use a microSD card to add more storage. The new Nokia E5 smartphone comes with a standard 2GB microSD memory card included, but it's possible to increase storage capacity via the card slot. The Nokia E5 phone also supports microSDHC, so that the maximum capacity becomes 32GB. With all the software applications, social network activities, business programs and multimedia files at hand, storage capacity becomes more important for such a Smartphone.

There’s a 5 megpixel camera too, with flash, a panorama mode, and a potentially useful sequence shooting mode that has a range of settings that go down to taking one phone every half hour. Potential time-lapse fans might find that fun to try. However images weren’t the best we’ve ever seen. The panorama mode, too, came up with very thin, wide photos that aren’t really all that useful when you transfer them to a computer.

The good summary: Solid design; inexpensive; physical QWERTY keypad; good battery life. Brilliant for messaging, comfortable, camera not as bad as you'd have heard. Good loud speaker.

The bad summary: Dated S60 interface; third-party app support not great; camera has no autofocus feature; no support for video calls. UI hard to navigate for iphone users, low resolution screen. No secondary camera for 3g on the front of the phone.

General	2G Network	GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
	3G Network	HSDPA 900 / 1900 / 2100
		HSDPA 850 / 1900 / 2100
	Announced	2010, April
	Status	Available. Released 2010, August
Size	Dimensions	115 x 58.9 x 12.8 mm, 75 cc
	Weight	126 g
Display	Type	TFT, 256K colors
	Size	320 x 240 pixels, 2.36 inches
		- QWERTY keyboard
Sound	Alert types	Vibration, MP3 ringtones
	Speakerphone	Yes
		- 3.5 mm audio jack
Memory	Phonebook	Practically unlimited entries and fields, Photocall
	Call records	Detailed, max 30 days
	Internal	250 MB; 256MB RAM
	Card slot	microSD, up to 32GB, 2GB included, buy memory
Data	GPRS	Class 32
	EDGE	Class 32
	3G	HSDPA 10.2 Mbps; HSUPA 2.0 Mbps
	WLAN	Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, UPnP & DLNA technology
	Bluetooth	Yes, v2.0 with A2DP
	Infrared port	No
	USB	Yes, v2.0 microUSB
Camera	Primary	5 MP, 2592 x 1944 pixels, fixed-focus, LED flash
	Video	Yes, VGA@15fps
	Secondary	No
Features	OS	Symbian OS v9.3, Series 60 rel. 3.2
	CPU	ARM 11 600 MHz processor
	Messaging	SMS, MMS, Email, Push Email, IM
	Browser	WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML
	Radio	Stereo FM radio with RDS
	Games	Downloadable
	Colors	Carbon Black, Chalk White, Sky Blue, Copper Brown, Silver Grey
	GPS	Yes, with A-GPS support; Ovi Maps
	Java	Yes, MIDP 2.0
		- Document editor (Word, Excel, PowerPoint), PDF viewer
		- MP4/H.264/H.263/WMV player
		- MP3/WAV/WMA/eAAC+ player
		- Flash Lite v3.0
		- Voice command/dial
		- Organizer
		- T9
Battery		Standard battery, Li-Ion 1200 mAh (BL-4D)
	Stand-by	Up to 635 h (2G) / Up to 670 h (3G)
	Talk time	Up to 12 h 10 min (2G) / Up to 5 h 30 min (3G)
	Music play	Up to 38 h