Nokia E7 Preview: First Look

Nokia E7 Preview: First Look
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Nokia E7: First Look

Even though iOS and Android devices are cleaning up in the high end smartphone segment, Nokia is still the undisputed leader in the budget smartphone and the feature phone categories.

Even so, Nokia isn’t ready to accept defeat, and has announced a range of new phones that it believes will help it regain some lost market share and make it a major player yet again.

The new range of high end Symbian smartphones sport excellent hardware specifications and all run on the Symbian ^3 OS. The Symbian ^3 OS is the latest version of Symbian for touchscreen phones. The first phone to sport it was the Nokia N8 which will be available soon. However, Nokia has announced two more phones which will run Symbian ^3. The first is the Nokia E7, a superb smartphone which will have a 4 inch AMOLED display and a QWERTY keypad with an 8 MP camera. It is probably the best Nokia phone to be announced yet. The second is a budget version of the E7, with a smaller display but an equally impressive hardware spec sheet.

In this preview, we will take a close look at the Nokia E7 and what it has to offer.

Design

The Nokia E7 has one of the most stylish slider designs I’ve ever seen. It is quite slim and as compact as a phone with a 4 inch display can be. With dimensions of 123.7 x 62.4 x 13.6 mm and a weight of 176 gms, it is quite pocketable.

It has a 4 inch AMOLED display with a capacitive touchscreen and a resolution of 360 x 640 pixels. The nHD resolution may seem a bit less than the standard Android display resolution of 480 x 800 pixels in high end smartphones.

Hardware and OS

The Nokia E7 really shines when it comes to hardware capabilities. It has a 680 MHz ARM 11 processor and 256 MB RAM. It also has a dedicated 3D graphics hardware accelerator. It comes with 16 GB internal storage.

It runs the Symbian ^3 OS and and has decent application support, though not as much as iOS or Android. It comes with Nokia Messaging or email and the Ovi Store.

Multimedia

The Nokia E7 is not as good as the Nokia N8, in terms of multimedia, but it does a very good job. It comes with an 8 MP fixed focus camera with an image capture resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels. It also has dual LED flash and comes with features like geotagging and face detection. It can record 720p HD video at 25 FPS and also has a front facing secondary VGA camera.

It comes with HDMI out and can play MP3, WAV, WMA and eAAC audio files. In video, it can handle MP4, H.264, 3GP and WMV files. It also comes with a stereo FM radio with RDS.

nokia-e7-2

Connectivity

The Nokia E7, like all other smartphones in this range, offers almost everything under the sun in terms of connectivity features. It has GPRS, EDGE, 3G HSDPA, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0 connectivity with USB-On-The-Go support. It also has a GPS chip with A-GPS support and Ovi Maps 3.0.

It is powered by a 1200 mAh battery with around 9 hours of rated talk time.

Conclusion

The Nokia E7 is one of the best Symbian smartphones by Nokia which will launch soon. It will be around the same price point as the Nokia N8, maybe slightly higher. You can also check out the Nokia C6-01 if you want a cheaper Symbian QWERTY alternative. If you want just a touchscreen Symbian phone, check out the Nokia C7.