Nokia E7 Business Phone Review

Nokia E7 is the successor to the famed communicator series of business phones, which first started shipping in 1996 with the Nokia 9000 and culminated with the Nokia E90. But, is Nokia E7 worthy of being the successor to the famed series? Well, if we look at the phone in isolation, it has better hardware better software and better features than any of the communicators ever. But phones don't exist in isolation, it has to face competition. While earlier communicator series phones were the best in the industry during their time, this is not the case with E7. It is at par with most of the phones available in market. Hardware: E7 offers brilliant build quality. The design of the phone is almost the same as the Nokia N8. Though it is a bit bulkier but looks good nevertheless. Quality of material and choice of hardware is also of good quality. The slider function of the phone works with a reassuring click and the hinge mechanism exudes confidence too. However, the slider function is a bit hard and requires quite a lot of effort. And aluminium body of the phone makes it slippery and doesn't help the matter while opening the slider. The phone, which weighs 176 gram, is lighter than the HTC Desire Z that weighs 180 gram despite having a smaller screen. The phone comes with 3.5 mm jack placed on top of the phone along with a mini HDMI port, power key, and a micro USB slot with a charge indicator. At the bottom, E7 has a microphone and a single speaker. The speaker quality is good, with no sound distortion even at the highest volume levels. However, due to the placement of the speaker, the sound gets muffled when you keep the phone on a flat surface. On the right hand side is a SIM tray. As the there is no removable battery cover, the SIM has been placed outside the normal placement in the battery compartment. On the same side, there is a volume slider (normal buttons would have been better), which is not really comfortable, and an ergonomically placed camera button. On the left side of the phone there is a lone screen-locking slider, which is placed in the dead centre of the side and has excellent spring. It is easily accessible even when using the physical keyboard. The keyboard of the E7 is really good with a nice tactile feedback which is fantastic despite the short key travel. The key spacing is also spot on. The 4 inch AMOLED touchscreen is bright and beautiful, even in bright sun. Even though it has a mere 640 x 360 pixels resolution (what Nokia calls nHD), the images on the screen look nice and colourful. A sheet of Gorilla Glass protects the touchscreen and houses the proximity and light sensors, the earpiece, and a front-facing camera (VGA). The E7 features almost the exact internals as the N8 including a mere 680MHz ARM 11 CPU that spoils the otherwise powerful spec sheet, a Broadcom BCM2727 GPU, 256MB of RAM, about 350MB of phone storage, and 16GB of internal mass storage. However, there is no MicroSD slot for expanding the storage capacity. On the connectivity front you get a full list of features with 3G HSPA (7.2 Mbps), WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0, and AGPS. There's even an FM receiver. There is no Nokia 2mm charging port for legacy power sources. The E7 also shares USB On-The-Go with its sibling, which allows it to host a number of common USB devices such as flash drives, self-powered hard drives, keyboards, and even optional accessories. In the box you will get an USB On-The-Go adapter, HDMI adapter, stereo headset, micro-USB cable, and micro-USB charger. However, HDMI cabal has not been provided. In our review piece, the charger was of USA standard and did not fit into our Indian standard socket (you will need an adaptor for it to fit). The phone comes with a 1200 mAH battery, which provides close to 48 hours of battery back, when using the phone for taking some pictures, couple of hours of talking on 2G network and push mail service active and a couple of downloads. This is decent for a smartphone with similar capabilities.