Nokia E7
The E7 is an evolution of Nokia’s long-running Communicator, as evidenced by it’s slide-out QWERTY keyboard. But its AMOLED screen and 8MP camera mean serious business of a different order.
If ‘mobile phone’ was an element, this is what an ingot of it would like: the E7 is one tough block of weighty satisfaction. Given a decent shove the screen pops up with improbable liveliness, revealing a spacious backlit rubber keyboard that’s easy to thumb out messages on.
Edge on, there’s a dedicated shutter button a zoom slider, USB, mini HDMI and 3.5mm jack. A large home key glows or blips with notifications, and there’s a sprung slider to toggle wake/sleep. Stir the E7 from its doze via the home button and there are bubbly shortcuts to contracts, messages and sound modes.
The 4 inches AMOLED screen is retina-burningly bright, with blacks that’d make Satan’s soul shudder. Prodding it is rewarded with reassuring haptics, but it takes time for word to reach the relatively weedy 680MHz processor, which acts with disarming sloth in an age of dual-core 1GHz smartphones.
The impressive lensmanship of Nokia’s N8 came at the price of an unsightly bulge; the E7’s *MP snapper is flush to the casing, but it doesn’t compare to the N8’s for quality. It’s a serviceable bit of dual-LED flashkit, let down by poor low-light performance. And where’s our pinch-to-zoom and touch-to-focus.
Tech Specs
Operating System: Symbian 3
Display: 4 inch 640x360 AMOLED ClearBlack capacitative touch screen
Storage: 16GB internal
Processor: 680MHz ARM 11
Connectivity: 3G, 3.5mm socket Bluetooth 3.0, miniHDMI USB 2.0, Wi-Fi (b/g/n)
Cameras: 8MP with dual-LED flash, VGA front-facing
Video: 720p @ 25fps
Battery: 9hrs talk
Techy Gadgetz says… A thoroughbred screen and keyboard, but held back by a sluggish OS and weedy processor, rating 3 stars.
