Nokia E5

Moving beyond enterprise

Cool Convention

Nokia’s E series has been known to dole out some impressive devices to cater to the ‘enterprise’ related needs of its users. But considering the fact that features that were earlier tagged as enterprise are now moving to the masses and Email has become as cool for a collegiate as it was useful for a CEO, ‘E’ series by Nokia has also moved into providing affordable offerings to its consumers. Nokia E63 was one such device and the latest in this series is the E5, which comes power-packed with features and stays conventional or rather ‘E-ish’ in style. This is a QWERTY bar phone, whose front panel has a 2.6 inch landscape screen and a big comfy D-pad right below it. On the left of the D-Pad we have the menu, home and calling key and on the right are the contacts, messaging and call end buttons. Below the navigation controls is a QWERTY keypad with slightly larger keys, which are very tactile to use. The left spine is completely bare and the right one has the volume rocker. Charging port and 3.5 mm jack are at the top. There are two push buttons on each side of the phone to unlock the battery cover. The microSD card slot is under the battery, so you cannot hotswap it.

The back panel hosts a 5.0-megapixel camera with LED flash. Its not a surprise that Nokia has adhered to convention when it comes to the phone’s looks and design. . It’s a bit thicker than the iconic E71, but if someone is looking for an affordable E-series phone, this one fits the bill.

Symbian Prowess

Nokia E5 runs on Symbian 9.3 operating system along with S60 3rd edition UI Feature Pack 2. The homescreen has an active standby mode, where you can access a numberof features from the homescreen itself. These shortcuts are customisable. Apart from active screen, you can also take recourse to options such as, basic, vertical icon bar, talking theme and contacts bar. The basic one just has the wallpaper and default indicators. Vertical one has four tabs - shortcuts, calendar, music player and personalisation, while the horizontal one gives you six rows to place customisable shortcuts.

The phone supports all popular Email clients and comes with preloaded settings for popular inboxes like Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail along with Microsoft Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes traveller. Some mailboxes, which are popular in India such as Indiatimes and Sify too are pre-loaded on the device. On the social networking front, the phone has preloaded Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Twitter, hi5 and Friendster. To start networking, all you need to do is log in. While Facebook is a pre-loaded app, Twitter and MySpace are just Internet links. The device also comes with Microsoft Office Communicator that allows an organization to enable IM chatting among its employers. For the ‘non-enterprise’ kinds, the phone offers Ovi Chat that combines, Windows Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger and Gtalk along with Nokia’s Ovi contacts for a single client instant messaging experience. The Ovi Sync feature syncs all your personal data on the phone and saves it on Ovi.com. You can sync your contacts, calendar and notes, while also being able to decide the sync interval for keeping the data up to date.

It is an established fact that a Symbian browser comes with flash support. While browsing, you can use the keypad for shortcuts and the shortcut key is given in the options tab of the browser. The browsing experience is good in terms of navigating through the pages. However, the small display does limit the user experience. The phone comes with WiFi for faster Internet speeds. We also have GPS and with Ovi Maps and free navigation. The phone can be used to find directions. There is QuickOffice with which you can open and create documents.

More Fun

On the multimedia front, the phone comes with a 5.0-megapixel fixed focus camera. There are scene mode options like portrait, landscape, sports, night, etc. Self-timer, sequence shot, extended digital zoom and flash are the additional features available. You can also shoot in panorama mode. Geo-tagging is not enabled, and the picture quality is still acceptable. The videos are shot at VGA resolution at 15 fps, whose quality didn’t excite us much.

The music player sorts the songs on the basis of artists, album, genre and composer. There are equaliser presets and you can create your own too. Bass Boost and stereo widening options are included. The sound quality of the phone is impressive and 3.5 mm jack is an additional advantage. The FM radio comes with RDS support and reception is among the best in the market. You can also tune into Internet radio. The device has a 2GB microSD card bundled with it, but it can support up to 32 GB. The battery backup is impressive; one full charge kept us going for more than a day and a half, with couple of hours of music, calling, constant Email and about eight hours of WiFi usage.

Alternatively

The Nokia E5 costs Rs 11,700. Another QWERTY option can be BlackBerry 8520 but it has a 2.0-megapixel camera. On the touchscreen front you can opt for HTC Wildfire, which is an Android phone costing Rs 15,400.