Review Of The Nokia E7 Design And User Interface

Review Of The Nokia E7 Design And User Interface
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Introduction

Nokia E7

The Nokia E7 was announced in September 2010 and is expected to be released at the end of 2010. This Nokia smartphone has been designed with style in mind as well as with the functionality to cater for business minded users. The Nokia E7 is obviously the newest member of the Nokia E series line of business phones. It adds to the success of this family of phones which already includes notable successes such as the Nokia E71 and the Nokia E72.

The Nokia E7 takes its role as the Nokia E series flagship model way into 2011. There are some features new to the Nokia E series such as the Symbian^3 Operating System and the multi-touch screen among others. This Nokia phone is bound to generate the attention it demands.

Let us start off by looking at the design and what it has to offer.

Design (5 out of 5)

Nokia E7

At first sight you would be excused for thinking the Nokia E7 is the Nokia N8 as they look remarkably similar. The Nokia E7 has got a trick up its sleeve in that it comes with a tilting slide out QWERTY keyboard that comes out on the left side of the phone.

The Nokia E7 measures 123.7 x 62.4 x 13.6 mm and weighs 176 grams. This Nokia E Series phone comes in a selection of dark gray, silver white, green, blue or orange. The front face of the Nokia E7 is equipped with an AMOLED capacitive touchscreen that is capable of displaying 16M colors with a resolution of 360 x 640 pixels and 4.0 inches in length. Below the display there is the notch for the microphone.

The back side of the phone is pretty much plain equipped with the panel that houses the primary 8MP camera with the dual LED flash. The sides are rounded off and controls are kept at a minimum, basically the card slots and the hardware camera dedicated button.

Additions to the top panel are the usual Nokia signature power button and right next to it there is the HDMI slot, the USB slot and the 3.5 mm audio jack.

User Interface (4 out of 5)

The Nokia E7 with the Symbian^3 OS keeps the familiar interface that is synonymous with previous Symbian versions. The navigation model is simple and straightforward. With touch sensitive controls you can easily navigate back and forth between applications and settings options. There is no five-way scroll panel on the Nokia E7 as this kind of navigation model does not require it.

Also on the Nokia E7 is an on-display soft numpad, and soft QWERTY keyboard. You can use a Nokia approved stylus for text entry since this Nokia E7 phone supports hand writing recognition which is ideal for entering large amounts of text especially when editing long documents, emails and text messages.

There is a home screen on the Nokia E7 which is the starting point for any activity on the phone. The home screen supports widgets for compatible applications, and alerts for events such as incoming messages and reminders. The clock, selected or customized applications and controls for the multimedia player can also be accessed from the home screen.

Features (5 out of 5)

Nokia E7

The Nokia E7 comes with a clear black display that spans the entire front face. This display supports multi-touch screen input methods, a proximity sensor, touch sensitive controls and handwriting recognition. There is also an accelerometer for auto-rotate detection.

There is a speakerphone on the device as well as a 3.5 mm audio jack for listening to multimedia files, recording voice memos and making and receiving phone calls.

Other multimedia features of interest on the Nokia E7 include a Stereo FM radio with RDS support, a TV-out supporting 720p video via HDMI and composite and Dolby Digital Plus via HDMI. There is a MP3/WAV/eAAC+/WMA music player and a MP4/H.264/H.263/WMV video player on board the device.

In addition to the audio visual devices, there is a photo editor and a video editor on the device. Games and applications can be downloaded from sources over the internet and can also be installed via Bluetooth and cable connections.

As for Internet browsing, the Nokia E7 has a WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML and RSS feeds browser with options for installing third party web browsers. There is also Flash Lite 4.0 for richer internet applications, device applications and games.

True to its reputation as a business phone, the Nokia E7 comes with document viewers for MS Word, MS Excel, MS PowerPoint and PDF files. With a subscription you can get an upgrade to be able to edit these documents.

The 8MP primary camera on the Nokia E7 supports a resolution of up to 3264 x 2448 pixels with fixed focus and LED flash. The camera is also capable of Geo-tagging and face detection. With the video camera you can record HD quality video clips of up to 720p at 25fps with video stabilization.

The Nokia E7 comes with 16GB internal storage, 256MB of RAM and an addition 1GB ROM. Unfortunately there is no card slot for external storage on the Nokia E7.

As far as data connectivity goes on the Nokia E7, GPRS, EDGE and 3G of up to 10.2Mbps is supported. Other data connectivity options on the Nokia E7 are Wi-Fi and Bluetooth version 3.0. As for navigation features, the Nokia E7 comes with A-GPS support and pre-installed Ovi Maps 3.0.

Performance (4 out of 5)

Nokia E7

With the Nokia E7 packing the super fast ARM 11 680 MHz processor and a hardware based 3D Graphics accelerator, it’s no surprise that the performance is nothing less than superb. Also vastly improved from previous Nokia E Series phones is the operating system. The Nokia E7 comes with the enhanced and improved Symbian^3 OS. This gives the phone vast improvements on boot times and response on launching applications.

The standard battery on the Nokia E7 gives up to 432 hours on 2G and up to 480 hours standby time on 3G. The talk time is up to 9 hours on 2G and up to 5 hours on 3G.

The camera has a great resolution and great data compression. Unlike most Nokia phones, the Nokia E7 comes with above average high resolution photos, though still unlike most commercial or hobbyist digital cameras.

Zeroing in on the GPS satellites is expected to take a while except in cases where Assisted GPS through the cellphone networks has been activated.

Verdict (4 out of 5)

The Nokia E7 is a great phone to have and a welcome change to the Nokia E Series family of business oriented smartphones. The design is excellent with its options for a hardware QWERTY slide out keyboard making this phone much easier to use. The downside of the Nokia E7 falls on the fact that it does not provide options for external storage, which in itself may not be a problem as many mobile users wont get to utilize the 16GB provided internally in the first place.

The other thing that psychologically gets to me is the non-changeable battery. In the past I have had to replace my phone battery as batteries do die. I guess with iPhone’s successes Nokia knows what they are doing.

All in all the Nokia E7 is definitely a phone to pick once it hits the markets near you.