Continuing from my post covering impressions of Nokia World 2010 …
Nokia’s best ever and the first touch screen E-Series Flagship E7-00 The design of this handset been out since a long while making rounds of rumors that it could be Nokia N9, I always said it can’t be and I had many reasons of my own. Reasons for confusion were the touch screen itself.
Nokia E-Series were always meant to be business people and business people were tend to have focus on crystal clear connectivity, pocketability, durability and ultra-long battery life. But it was becoming more and more impossible for even business people to be completely away from touch screens in the way, many business oriented features were becoming touch-only or more productive on touch.
After iPad started taking some of the sales in Business streets even after its bigger size against pocketibility, it was like a stone on heart that was to break down some day and should say probably BlackBerry was first to take the call by announcing Torch. Nokia came to say that why not the big daddy of family should have the biggest of the game rather than buying expensive phones for kids only?
Just take a look over the pics above and you find it beyond a beauty that could be easily described, specially when you know its a Nokia means you are assured that it got no compromises under the hood and will be as powerful as are its looks. And if after Antennagate, people started tending to think that compact design means compromise with signal and Antenna then Nokia has just one three word answer “Its an E”
Let me try to go into details of Nokia E7-00 (RM-626) though it seems hard for me as the urge to get one is so troubling as I know I have not even received words about Nokia C6, Nokia N8 or Nokia C7 from @WomworldNokia neither E7 gonna release by this year 😦
Exteriors, pocketibility and durability Like I was talking in my post two days back, if Nokia really thinking that they are on a downward slope and wanna get a real come back in big way, then they don’t have to just make out some figures here and there or just to offer some mouth watering prices, they have to bang some real hard, need to accomplish something that no one else would have come closer or even could dare to come in next few months.
The design and build of Nokia E7 shown really such a commitment and aggression. Just think that Nokia N8 is just 0.7mm slimmer than this one, when there is no physical keypad. With closed slide, Nokia E7-00 just look like a bigger screen version of Nokia N8 without showing any un-necessary sign that it hides a best ever keypad of planet inside it. Once you open it, you find people bow down in respect.
Definitely, if a touch phone would have slipped in pockets of CEOs and CTOs, then it couldn’t have been something more slimmer, compact and super effective like Nokia E7-00. Would you mind, if a gorgeous 4” super responsive multi-touch screen serves as your all-in-one smartphone-cum-tablet-cum-tourguide-cum-handycam in this much compact form?
We have dimensions of 123.7 x 62.4 x 13.6 mm with 104.9cc and 176g weight (considerably higher than Nokia N8, 41g). My Nokia N82 has a weight of 114g with 17.3mm and Nokia N900 had 181g with 18mm, so even if we got a slimmer device here, don’t expect it to be lighter in any sense. You gonna have a solid piece of metal in your hand that will effectively working for hitting someone hard, if you find any trouble. LOL
If wanna more praises for the build then one should not only see the tilted screen like Nokia N97 mini, but also the redesigned and pronounced as super perfect keypad of Nokia E7-00.
You can see that the new keypad design of Nokia E7-00 makes very decent use of additional space provided due to a 4” screen, more evenly spaced big keys and a much bigger space bar. Can you still make a complaint?
The only thing that worries me is the thing that many even praise, the titled slide mechanism. I was worried about it with my Nokia N97 Mini trial as well and feel same here. What if someone drops his E7-00 badly with Slide open? I think horizontal slide of Nokia N900 was more robust with such use cases.
Update: As Brendan posted, look like I was worrying for no reasons. Nokia is always known for being solid. I remember when my old Nokia 3310 was hanging and hitting from a bicycle for half an hour and still I just got only battery cover, keypad out. It seems that even tilted slide is also same strong.
But on the other side, tilted sliding screen means easy to read while typing without bending your head over the device, if you put that on table and start typing. So, people have reasons to find more charm in tilted screens.
Display from here the confusions started, people think that why Nokia didn’t went with doing hand-to-hand with Apple offering a higher resolution or at least Nokia N900’s resolution, when they have such a big screen? Even if they convince themselves somehow then Nokia itself bring new question that why not at least CBD like they already given to rest of two devices announced on the same day?
Yes! there is no limit of what one will be wishing from a device and there is sure a compromise, whatever Nokia designer may give excuse for. I had seen Nokia N900 in 800×480 and I know that everything look smooth over it. Is it something related to Symbian itself that we never getting anything more than 640×360?
Nokia E7-00 sports 24 bit colors, 640×360 resolution, AMOED display and obviously big 4” size, which is entitled to do wonder with GPU available with 2D/3D Graphics HW Accelerator with OpenVG1.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0 support.
Processor, memory etc Though people are pushing higher for snapdragon, but Nokia still continues with 680 MHz. One should think that Symbian provides full multi-tasking at its best even on 600 MHz devices, which other ‘leading’ and ‘advanced’ OS not able to do even after having 1GHz processors. Not only MHz matters.
When we move over memory specifications, then it becomes more clear that Nokia E7-00 was never geared to take on Nokia N8, but came in just to cater needs of other genre.
We find same 350 mb max user storage, 16Gb internal memory, 256 MB RAM and 1 GB NAND. Have I missed something? No!! its not me, its Nokia, who missed inclusion of MicroSD card. Blame the same design decisions that took the liberty of battery changing away for keeping the dimensions insanely slim. So, no MicroSD card Support in Nokia E7-00.
I will say that USB On the GO might become the big reason of loosing MicroSD cards support in many devices soon and sure a place, where a manufacturer could think of compromising now. But sure, many will feel annoy as it makes you to have three things in pocket; A cable, A pen drive and Nokia E7. There are reasons to be annoyed.
Connectivity While the other two devices were the budget editions in their ways, being the flagship of E-Series, Nokia E7-00 had no reasons to keep a break over connectivity options. So, from pentaband to Bluetooth 3.0, from USB OTG (Nokia Adapter Cable for USB OTG CA-157Connector) to HDMI (Nokia Adapter Cable for HDMI CA-156), you find everything here so that you may not feel any missing connectivity option with it. Same richness, when we talk about security features and protocols supported, Nokia E7-00 is always one step ahead of whatever you might have seen in a Nokia E (Except battery life, will discuss later).
Other advanced features Ovi Maps, free navigation, USB OTG kind of things becoming kind of granted now, when we talk about high end Nokia, same about software’s like Quick Office Premium and Adobe PDF.
What’s not here is 2mm charging and FM-transmitter. Rest everything, you would have seen in other two devices, find a place here in Nokia E7.
Lovely is HTML Emails part, which Nokia E72 been craving since like decades. Such a big screen is sure powerhouse and complete solution for all kind of business needs. People will really come to think if they need to buy Netbooks.
This is also expected to have much important features like remote lock and wipe and may be many more will come out in news as the day progresses. Marketing works that way.
Multimedia, Camera It was Nokia that started that even Business Phones should have best of cameras and others are just trying to catch up now. But still we found only E72 as the best attempt on camera from Nokia side.
Many found themselves frustrated to hear about a camera of 8 MP without auto-focus. If just that was included then without any doubt sales of Nokia E7 might have beating Nokia N8 and business oriented people weren’t having any doubt in mind.
While Nokia E72 was able to focus in range 10cm to infinity, we are stuck with 50 cm to infinity for Nokia E7-00. I don’t mind not having Dual LED in place of Xenon here, but Business phones should be able to take close scan like images of documents. That’s a huge use case. We really feel like 8 MP wasted here even if its not that disappointing in comparison to others (Samsung SGS don’t even have Flash leave focus/ auto-focus aside).
Still like rest of two devices, it can record 1280 x 720 videos @25fps with video digital zoom of 3x. Aperture here is f/2.8. Why no one thought about variable aperture again after Nokia N86?
Power management Here comes the critical part, when one wishes to make a Touch Screen Business Smartphone. Nokia E-Series phones were meant to have insane battery lives with 1500 mAh batteries and E72 had 13 hours of talktime, but sure when you have a 4” screen, then compromises will be on the way.
Honestly, if we think about others, then even the above stats look awesome, but as per Nokia E-Series standards, sure its not exactly on the mark and real test will begin when the device would be out.
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Not to mention, it was impossible to provide a replaceable battery in this dimension. Face it, you can’t have it all. A super slim device and that too with moving part, can’t work.
Price The price point is real huge at 495 EUR means 631 USD or 30, 000 INR and will not attract buyers that easily as Nokia N8, C7 and C6-01 would be making, but sure this is a device that many geeks will look for. I just wish, if Nokia wouldn’t have compromised on Camera, though I know making this much slimmer device was real hard.
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Wanna see how Nokia E7 will look like?
Or even Hands on …
So, this was all about Nokia E7-00 first impressions, many thing will come out in more clear in next days and may be new Nokia PUSH will make its debut presentation on one. So many things have to be seen yet.
It has gone bigger than expected, but my post is not finished yet. Still things to talk about are services and those 3D glasses, but I guess, now I will be back by next day night only. So, till then ..
Nitish Kumar's Blog 
Nitish, I totally just did you the favor (???) of dropping my N97 Mini from ear height with the hinge open, twice!! Guess what – it’s a Nokia! Not an iPhone. One of the times the battery popped out, but other than that – not a scratch. Twice is probably more times than a phone will get dropped in it’s lifetime anyway. I think you should discount that potential flaw.
OMG!! that’s too much mate. Sure, I am going to make changes in my text right away, but still will wish to have my hands on it to feel the same.