This is the review of the Nokia E5 which i bought a month ago. The phone is a QWERTY bar Messenger powered by the Symbian OS v9.3, Series 60 rel. 3.2.
This is my First review ever, so please bear with the mistakes and please do provide feedback.
So let’s see what this is all about!
Introduction
Nokia E5 was released in the Third quarter of 2010, so its not a new model in the market.
Nokia C3 was an excellent messenger, but it had a drawback Symbian was missing in it.
The Nokia E5 brings Symbian onboard and along with it, its main advantage- Multitasking.
Notable Features:
• 2.36†QVGA display with excellent Sunlight legibility
• ARM 11 600 MHz processor, 256MB RAM
• 250MB user-accessible storage
• 2gb MicroSD card included, upgradeable upto 32gb
• 5 megapixel fixed-focus camera, LED flash
• 3G with 10.2Mbps HSDPA and 2Mbps HSUPA
• Bluetooth v2.0
• Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g
• GPS receiver, with Free Navigation from Ovi maps
• Good audio quality
• Lots of social networking apps included
• Office document editor; PDF viewer; ZIP file support
• Microsoft Office Messenger support
Notable Disadvantages:
• Fixed focus 5mp camera !
• Poor video recording
• Memory card compartment under battery
• Low resolution screen
• No Secondary Video call camera
Note the absence of a secondary camera
The Nokia E5 unlike the other e-series offerings is targeted at a younger audience, maybe young people in a corporate world. So unlike the other E-series, it has given importance to the different Social networking sites and IM chatting along with the different business applications.
The reason for me to go for qwerty is that I detest Touch Screen phones for the lack of feedback while u type or click, somehow the vibration never appealed to me and i was left with little choice and i badly wanted to dump my 5800 xpress music .
The keypad is as easy as it can get !
Un-boxing
The Nokia E5 comes with a modest set of accessories
A charger – The low output one.
A single piece headset, which is good for attending calls and nothing else!
A short microUSB cable.
And some manuals
Also you get a 2 GB microSD card, which is enough to get us started.
Design
The moment we see the E5, we actually don’t feel anything! Its not much of a “look at me “ type ,but its not a ugly duckling either. The phone’s dimension is perfectly comfortable, although not as slim as the E71 or E72.
The back has a metal Battery cover which attracts a lot of fingerprints! and Impressive looking lens!
The Build Quality is top tier as expected from an E-series. The phone is very solid although it doesn’t use metal as much as its siblings. The back battery cover is made of metal and the rest of the body is plastic. The plastics don’t feel cheap and doesn’t attract fingerprints.
The front of the phone houses the 2.36†256k 320x240 display. The resolution is a tad low in the current market, but the image quality is good and the sunlight legibility is very good.
Looking at the front, we see the ambient light sensor and notice that the secondary camera is missing.
Under the display we see the D-pad with a notification light ring inside it.
Two soft keys on either side and below them we have The Home key, which on short press gives us the menu and on long press gives the Task manager. The other side has a messaging key which gives the messaging menu on short press and the long press can be configured to your choice and under them the call and end knobs. The soft keys and the D-pad are user-configurable (depending on the homescreen mode).
These keys have sufficient space in between for comfortable use, although the home and messaging keys would take some time to get accustomed to.
Next is the QWERTY keyboard which i found extremely similar to the ones sported by the E71 and E72 although the keys are a bit bigger and thereby making it easier to type on than the E72 or E71.
The spacebar on holding for 5 sec (in standby) powers the LED flash and we have a powerful torch in our hands. Another perk is that it overrides the keyboard lock too.
Pretty plain except for the volume rocker which is easy to use and the latch !
On either side are two latches that open the battery cover, which first confused me into thinking that its the shutter key.
The top has a 2mm charger plug, a 3.5mm audio jack and the microUSB port, which is hidden under a plastic flap.
Another thing is that The Battery can be charged via both USB and Charger port, a handy feature if you are travelling in a bus or train, although i noticed that charging via USB takes a bit of extra time.
The rear Houses the 5Megapixel Fixed Focus camera lens, which is left without any protection and to its right the loud speaker grill.
Under the battery cover is a 1200Mah BL-4D battery which is really powerful and gives around 9-10 hours of talk time or 3 days of light usage. Under the battery we find the MicroSD slot and the Sim card slot , which makes the memory card Non-Hot swappable
User Interface
Homescreen
The Nokia E5 is powered by Symbian 9.3 and runs on the S60 3rd edition user interface with Feature Pack 2
E5 uses the Active Standby Homescreen which is available in 6 different Looks
Namely:
• Basic
• Vertical Icon Bar
• Horizontal Icon Bar
• Active
• Contacts Theme
• Talking theme
The Basic layout just shows us the Wallpaper and status indicators and you can assign functions to the D-pad keys, Like S 40. This Is the least complicated layout, obviously.
The Vertical Icon Bar shows different shortcut icons on the left side which extend to the full screen when you move the selection to the different shortcuts. This layout keeps most of the wallpaper in view.
The remaining Layouts are more complicated with the different homescreen applications and user assigned shortcuts.
The Horizontal icon bar offers various shortcuts (horizontally) on the top and below are Email, calendar, Ovi chat and WLan arranged vertically.
The active standby is the good’ol active standby from the previous symbians .It looks like the horizontal layout but tucks a clock in too.
The other option is the Contact bar layout, which has been available on Nokia handsets for quite a while too. It puts a row of favourite contacts on top three home screen applications - Calendar, WLAN wizard, Ovi Contacts – along with the usual six customizable shortcuts (this time at the bottom).The favourite Contacts can be placed on the top with a photo and their name.
There is one last layout left, the talking theme which reads out the selected option.
Menu remains unchanged from the previous versions.
The phone is powered by a powerful ARM II 600mhz CPU with 256 MB ram which is enough for the not so thirsty Symbian OS .The UI is faster than the E72 owing to the better RAM.
The rest of the UI is pretty much same as the current Symbians.
On the whole the UI is lightly ahead of the ageing E72 which lacks a lot of those layouts and a few other tweaks inside.
Camera
The Nokia E5 sports a Five Megapixel camera, which sadly is a disappointment because of the lack of Autofocus. Its also the first 5 megapixel fixed focus camera on a phone
.It has a LED flash but no lens protection whatsoever. If you go into the settings , we see that it offers only a modest set of controls like limited control over light sensitivity (it has low, medium, high and auto settings) and sharpness and contrast.
The Nokia E5 is not a camera phone by any means, but they produce quite usable photos when used in good light conditions. Due to the fact that the camera is fixed focus, there is no way to click a macro shot. This makes the camera useless in case we want to scan a document or visiting card, which is a nifty feature on most Smartphones.
As far as video recording go, it does it in VGA resolution at 15 fps which is quite poor.
Connectivity
E5 offers almost everything we will use in the connectivity section, with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi( although 802.11n is not supported), 3G with 10.2mbps download and 2mbps Upload, Edge and Gprs. No Infrared.
Telephony
Call quality has always been a positive thing of the Eseries and E5 doesn’t disappoint us in the aspect, The call quality is exceptionally good ! Loudspeaker volume is okeyish, though clarity is good.
Another Nifty trick is the smart dialing feature which i am particularly fond of! which allows us to load a contact from the homescreen by just typing the name on the keypad!
Battery Life
The Battery life is very good, almost the same level as that of the E72.It offered me 3 full days of light usage ! On a full charge we can use the internet for around 5-6 hours on 3G with heavy downloading, Cool huh ?
Web Browser
The web browser as always with Symbian, is good and with the 256 MB Ram it makes sure we don’t get the “out of memory†errors easily.
YouTube videos are played with ease and I tried few other streaming sites too which worked.
One thing which is heavily missed, is the “New tab “option which was always missing in the Non touch Symbians and I don’t expect a change now. People who are used to touch interface might feel that the screen is a bit small for browsing, but its good enough once u get used to it.
Pre-Installed Apps & Utilities
• Symbian always had an excellent phonebook and E5 is no exception, One handy feature is that we can link a contact to the person’s facebook profile if he is your friend and viola, he gets his Profile picture, Status updated right in our Phonebook.
• Quick office with edit capability, Very nice!
• Has Adobe PDF preinstalled which can open even big files, but is not the best app if you are interested in reading ebooks through the mobile as zooming and wrapping is a bit odd.
• There is a zip manager which works out to be pretty fast!
• Good calendar which can be arranged in 4 different views.
Networking
• The Email by Nokia can be called nothing short of excellent, it can handle most of the common email providers like yahoo, gmail, rediff, etc.
The email Interface
• Open The Internet folder and u are treated to lots of social networking apps which include Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Hi5, and Friendster.
• It also has a chat client which can be used for Yahoo, Gtalk, Msn messenger and Ovi chat. Sadly Facebook is left out. But there are many good free clients like Nimbuzz or ebuddy etc.. Which can be downloaded from the Ovi store.
Media
• The Gallery is the same one from the Nseries, which is very good! Zooming and panning of a full size picture is zippy and does not have a lag owing to the 256 MB Ram.
• The Video player doesn’t play Xvid/Divx videos so you have to get a third party application for that otherwise the video player does its job well.
• The music player is the same one which is seen on the X-series. It handles the most common audio formats - MP3, AAC, eAAC+ and WMA
• The Company quotes a whooping 38 Hours music playback on a single charge.
• The Audio Quality although excellent, has low volume when an earphone is connected. I am looking for solution for this as of now.(btw, it would be enough for most people, but i like my music full volume)
GPS
• The inbuilt GPS receiver works perfectly and gets a satellite lock very fast.
Nokia also provides its Ovi maps with turn by turn navigation which is good for all the metro and top tier cities in India, but if u wanna go to a smaller city, Look for something else because Ovi maps does not have detailed maps for small cities.
Ovi Store
• The Ovi store by Nokia has been there for some time now and it offers thousand of apps and games and other downloads for Nokia phones. There are tons of free software, and if that doesn’t satisfy you there are thousands of apps and games which we can buy from the store.
Conclusion
The Nokia E5 is not an E72 beater, but it definitely comes very close to it. In a market which is ruled by touchscreen phones, E5 is a good option for the ones who don’t want a touchscreen , but want a feature rich phone without burning a hole in their pocket , E5 does the job perfectly Priced roughly at 9200INR, it has everything ,a more than average user would ask for.
I would give it a 4/5.
P.S I have used a few screenshots from gsmarena.com , where my screen snapper was unable to SNAP!
This is my First review ever, so please bear with the mistakes and please do provide feedback.
So let’s see what this is all about!
Introduction
Nokia E5 was released in the Third quarter of 2010, so its not a new model in the market.
Nokia C3 was an excellent messenger, but it had a drawback Symbian was missing in it.
The Nokia E5 brings Symbian onboard and along with it, its main advantage- Multitasking.
Notable Features:
• 2.36†QVGA display with excellent Sunlight legibility
• ARM 11 600 MHz processor, 256MB RAM
• 250MB user-accessible storage
• 2gb MicroSD card included, upgradeable upto 32gb
• 5 megapixel fixed-focus camera, LED flash
• 3G with 10.2Mbps HSDPA and 2Mbps HSUPA
• Bluetooth v2.0
• Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g
• GPS receiver, with Free Navigation from Ovi maps
• Good audio quality
• Lots of social networking apps included
• Office document editor; PDF viewer; ZIP file support
• Microsoft Office Messenger support
Notable Disadvantages:
• Fixed focus 5mp camera !
• Poor video recording
• Memory card compartment under battery
• Low resolution screen
• No Secondary Video call camera
Note the absence of a secondary camera
The Nokia E5 unlike the other e-series offerings is targeted at a younger audience, maybe young people in a corporate world. So unlike the other E-series, it has given importance to the different Social networking sites and IM chatting along with the different business applications.
The reason for me to go for qwerty is that I detest Touch Screen phones for the lack of feedback while u type or click, somehow the vibration never appealed to me and i was left with little choice and i badly wanted to dump my 5800 xpress music .
The keypad is as easy as it can get !
Un-boxing
The Nokia E5 comes with a modest set of accessories
A charger – The low output one.
A single piece headset, which is good for attending calls and nothing else!
A short microUSB cable.
And some manuals
Also you get a 2 GB microSD card, which is enough to get us started.
Design
The moment we see the E5, we actually don’t feel anything! Its not much of a “look at me “ type ,but its not a ugly duckling either. The phone’s dimension is perfectly comfortable, although not as slim as the E71 or E72.
The back has a metal Battery cover which attracts a lot of fingerprints! and Impressive looking lens!
The Build Quality is top tier as expected from an E-series. The phone is very solid although it doesn’t use metal as much as its siblings. The back battery cover is made of metal and the rest of the body is plastic. The plastics don’t feel cheap and doesn’t attract fingerprints.
The front of the phone houses the 2.36†256k 320x240 display. The resolution is a tad low in the current market, but the image quality is good and the sunlight legibility is very good.
Looking at the front, we see the ambient light sensor and notice that the secondary camera is missing.
Under the display we see the D-pad with a notification light ring inside it.
Two soft keys on either side and below them we have The Home key, which on short press gives us the menu and on long press gives the Task manager. The other side has a messaging key which gives the messaging menu on short press and the long press can be configured to your choice and under them the call and end knobs. The soft keys and the D-pad are user-configurable (depending on the homescreen mode).
These keys have sufficient space in between for comfortable use, although the home and messaging keys would take some time to get accustomed to.
Next is the QWERTY keyboard which i found extremely similar to the ones sported by the E71 and E72 although the keys are a bit bigger and thereby making it easier to type on than the E72 or E71.
The spacebar on holding for 5 sec (in standby) powers the LED flash and we have a powerful torch in our hands. Another perk is that it overrides the keyboard lock too.
Pretty plain except for the volume rocker which is easy to use and the latch !
On either side are two latches that open the battery cover, which first confused me into thinking that its the shutter key.
The top has a 2mm charger plug, a 3.5mm audio jack and the microUSB port, which is hidden under a plastic flap.
Another thing is that The Battery can be charged via both USB and Charger port, a handy feature if you are travelling in a bus or train, although i noticed that charging via USB takes a bit of extra time.
The rear Houses the 5Megapixel Fixed Focus camera lens, which is left without any protection and to its right the loud speaker grill.
Under the battery cover is a 1200Mah BL-4D battery which is really powerful and gives around 9-10 hours of talk time or 3 days of light usage. Under the battery we find the MicroSD slot and the Sim card slot , which makes the memory card Non-Hot swappable
User Interface
Homescreen
The Nokia E5 is powered by Symbian 9.3 and runs on the S60 3rd edition user interface with Feature Pack 2
E5 uses the Active Standby Homescreen which is available in 6 different Looks
Namely:
• Basic
• Vertical Icon Bar
• Horizontal Icon Bar
• Active
• Contacts Theme
• Talking theme
The Basic layout just shows us the Wallpaper and status indicators and you can assign functions to the D-pad keys, Like S 40. This Is the least complicated layout, obviously.
The Vertical Icon Bar shows different shortcut icons on the left side which extend to the full screen when you move the selection to the different shortcuts. This layout keeps most of the wallpaper in view.
The remaining Layouts are more complicated with the different homescreen applications and user assigned shortcuts.
The Horizontal icon bar offers various shortcuts (horizontally) on the top and below are Email, calendar, Ovi chat and WLan arranged vertically.
The active standby is the good’ol active standby from the previous symbians .It looks like the horizontal layout but tucks a clock in too.
The other option is the Contact bar layout, which has been available on Nokia handsets for quite a while too. It puts a row of favourite contacts on top three home screen applications - Calendar, WLAN wizard, Ovi Contacts – along with the usual six customizable shortcuts (this time at the bottom).The favourite Contacts can be placed on the top with a photo and their name.
There is one last layout left, the talking theme which reads out the selected option.
Menu remains unchanged from the previous versions.
The phone is powered by a powerful ARM II 600mhz CPU with 256 MB ram which is enough for the not so thirsty Symbian OS .The UI is faster than the E72 owing to the better RAM.
The rest of the UI is pretty much same as the current Symbians.
On the whole the UI is lightly ahead of the ageing E72 which lacks a lot of those layouts and a few other tweaks inside.
Camera
The Nokia E5 sports a Five Megapixel camera, which sadly is a disappointment because of the lack of Autofocus. Its also the first 5 megapixel fixed focus camera on a phone
.It has a LED flash but no lens protection whatsoever. If you go into the settings , we see that it offers only a modest set of controls like limited control over light sensitivity (it has low, medium, high and auto settings) and sharpness and contrast.
The Nokia E5 is not a camera phone by any means, but they produce quite usable photos when used in good light conditions. Due to the fact that the camera is fixed focus, there is no way to click a macro shot. This makes the camera useless in case we want to scan a document or visiting card, which is a nifty feature on most Smartphones.
As far as video recording go, it does it in VGA resolution at 15 fps which is quite poor.
Connectivity
E5 offers almost everything we will use in the connectivity section, with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi( although 802.11n is not supported), 3G with 10.2mbps download and 2mbps Upload, Edge and Gprs. No Infrared.
Telephony
Call quality has always been a positive thing of the Eseries and E5 doesn’t disappoint us in the aspect, The call quality is exceptionally good ! Loudspeaker volume is okeyish, though clarity is good.
Another Nifty trick is the smart dialing feature which i am particularly fond of! which allows us to load a contact from the homescreen by just typing the name on the keypad!
Battery Life
The Battery life is very good, almost the same level as that of the E72.It offered me 3 full days of light usage ! On a full charge we can use the internet for around 5-6 hours on 3G with heavy downloading, Cool huh ?
Web Browser
The web browser as always with Symbian, is good and with the 256 MB Ram it makes sure we don’t get the “out of memory†errors easily.
YouTube videos are played with ease and I tried few other streaming sites too which worked.
One thing which is heavily missed, is the “New tab “option which was always missing in the Non touch Symbians and I don’t expect a change now. People who are used to touch interface might feel that the screen is a bit small for browsing, but its good enough once u get used to it.
Pre-Installed Apps & Utilities
• Symbian always had an excellent phonebook and E5 is no exception, One handy feature is that we can link a contact to the person’s facebook profile if he is your friend and viola, he gets his Profile picture, Status updated right in our Phonebook.
• Quick office with edit capability, Very nice!
• Has Adobe PDF preinstalled which can open even big files, but is not the best app if you are interested in reading ebooks through the mobile as zooming and wrapping is a bit odd.
• There is a zip manager which works out to be pretty fast!
• Good calendar which can be arranged in 4 different views.
Networking
• The Email by Nokia can be called nothing short of excellent, it can handle most of the common email providers like yahoo, gmail, rediff, etc.
The email Interface
• Open The Internet folder and u are treated to lots of social networking apps which include Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Hi5, and Friendster.
• It also has a chat client which can be used for Yahoo, Gtalk, Msn messenger and Ovi chat. Sadly Facebook is left out. But there are many good free clients like Nimbuzz or ebuddy etc.. Which can be downloaded from the Ovi store.
Media
• The Gallery is the same one from the Nseries, which is very good! Zooming and panning of a full size picture is zippy and does not have a lag owing to the 256 MB Ram.
• The Video player doesn’t play Xvid/Divx videos so you have to get a third party application for that otherwise the video player does its job well.
• The music player is the same one which is seen on the X-series. It handles the most common audio formats - MP3, AAC, eAAC+ and WMA
• The Company quotes a whooping 38 Hours music playback on a single charge.
• The Audio Quality although excellent, has low volume when an earphone is connected. I am looking for solution for this as of now.(btw, it would be enough for most people, but i like my music full volume
)GPS
• The inbuilt GPS receiver works perfectly and gets a satellite lock very fast.
Nokia also provides its Ovi maps with turn by turn navigation which is good for all the metro and top tier cities in India, but if u wanna go to a smaller city, Look for something else because Ovi maps does not have detailed maps for small cities.
Ovi Store
• The Ovi store by Nokia has been there for some time now and it offers thousand of apps and games and other downloads for Nokia phones. There are tons of free software, and if that doesn’t satisfy you there are thousands of apps and games which we can buy from the store.
Conclusion
The Nokia E5 is not an E72 beater, but it definitely comes very close to it. In a market which is ruled by touchscreen phones, E5 is a good option for the ones who don’t want a touchscreen , but want a feature rich phone without burning a hole in their pocket , E5 does the job perfectly Priced roughly at 9200INR, it has everything ,a more than average user would ask for.
I would give it a 4/5.
P.S I have used a few screenshots from gsmarena.com , where my screen snapper was unable to SNAP!
