Nokia E7 review

Despite announcing recently that it would be switching to Windows Mobile as its primary smartphone platform, Nokia is still releasing phones running the Symbian operating system. Its latest, the E7, has a 4in AMOLED screen, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and an 8-megapixel camera with dual-LED flash.

Nokia’s hardware has always been impressively well engineered, and the E7 is another good example. It’s basically a slab of densely-packed electronics tapered at each end into a flat surface. The screen fits perfectly into a cut-away in the slab, and with a bit of pressure on the bottom edge, it pops out and back, sitting at an angle of 30 degrees to the keyboard underneath.

Unlike some previous Nokia phones, the keyboard’s sliding action is a bit clunky. A rugged slider on one side of the phone toggles the screen lock, while on the other side a similar slider controls volume. There’s a small pull-out tray for your SIM card, and a dedicated camera button, while the ports – headphone, USB and HDMI – along with the power button are located on the top edge.

Performance is excellent; we found the capacitive touchscreen smooth and responsive, and saw no lag when opening multiple applications. The screen’s 640×360 resolution is a bit disappointing compared to the 800×480 found on most other phones’ 4in screens, so detail in images won’t be quite as pin-sharp, but it’s incredibly colourful and contrast is outstanding.

Photos taken with the 8-megapixel camera are great, with balanced colours and sharp edges. There was far less grain and noise in dark areas compared to other phones’ shots, and the dual-LED flash did a good job of illuminating the scene. Videos were similar in quality, although zooming in produced tons of noise. There are plenty of options for the camera including face detection, white balance and manual ISO settings.

No matter how good the hardware is, we can’t forgive Nokia for sticking with Symbian. Our main bugbear is the networking model; it expects you to select a connection method for each application individually, so rather than just turning on Wi-Fi, you have to create a Wi-Fi connection which can then be assigned to an application. The next application you open will also ask which connection it should use. You can save this preference, but needed to assign a connection for each application is annoying.

This results in some strange behaviour. For a start, there doesn’t seem to be an Airplane mode toggle, because connections are tied to applications, so as long as you don’t open an app, you won’t connect. If you don’t have a SIM card fitted, you’re restricted to Offline mode, even though you can set up a Wi-Fi connection. This results in confusing messages such as ‘Create WLAN connection in Offline mode?’. The menu system is also far too complex and disorganised. The top-level categories don’t seem to have changed over the years, reflecting out-dated hardware options and features, while the numerous menu levels often terminate in only one option.

On a more practical level, we couldn’t seem to set up our email account. Despite widgets on the home screen that promise support for Gmail and other web email providers, the only option when you enter the setup process is Mail for Exchange. We tried entering our Gmail details, but despite a spinning logo indicating progress, our email wasn’t displayed, with no error message to tell us why. Nokia’s help page only suggests setting up an Ovi Mail account, and offers no help for Gmail or other free mail services.

Nokia’s Ovi app store is laughable compared to the Android, iPhone and Windows app stores. The featured apps on the front page are mostly casual games, graphical themes and other lightweight applications, whereas official apps from popular services such as Facebook and Twitter are missing.

With such gorgeous hardware but frustrating software, the E7 evokes mixed emotions, but, in short, we can’t advise our readers to invest in a handset whose operating system is obsolete, especially when that investment will set you back £440 SIM-free. For the same price you could have the pick of the best Android phones, such as the Google Nexus S, which offers the same amount of internal storage and has a larger screen resolution.