Nokia E72 Review
A review by a hardcore E71 user. Is it worth the upgrade?
After owning and E71 for over a year, which for me was by far the best phone that I have ever used, I was really excited about getting the new E72 since it featured a 600Mhz CPU which seemed to be my main and only issue with the E71. However the CPU was the only upgrade in this unit and almost everything else seemed to be in fact a downgrade. As mentioned by another reviewer this phone has serious stability issues. The FP2 OS is extremely buggy and crashes, reboots and freezes several times a day. Nokia really needs to work on a new firmware to correct this. Below is every quality of the phone that I could think of as compared to the E71.
HARDWARE
BUILD QUALITY: Definitely not as solid of a feeling compared to the mostly metal E71. The D-pad feels like cheap plastic and it has some free play. The back cover tends to move occasionally when you are holding the phone to your ear.
SPEAKERPHONE: Very poor quality compared to the E71. There is very noticeable buzzing near the maximum volume, even with high quality music files. Calls on speakerphone at max volume are plain annoying due to the buzzing. On top of that the speaker is not as loud as the one on the E71.
CALL QUALITY: Excellent call quality except at the maximum volume where the call speaker also becomes distorted.
KEYBOARD AND TOUCHPAD: The keyboard feels slightly better than the one on the E71. The buttons seem to give out somewhat of a better feedback. However the E72 is slightly wider than the E71 which makes it a little harder to type on with one hand. The new track pad navigation provides a very inconsistent performance and it is not even close to the one on the newer blackberries. Scrolling up and down is perfectly fine but scrolling sideways becomes an exercise. The good news is that the original directional pad like on the E71 is still there so you can just disable the touchpad if you hate it just as much as I did after a week of usage.
CAMERA: It is still a cell phone camera so keep your expectations low. It takes decent pictures and the quality is about the same as the E71 but with 5 megapixel images and slightly wider lens. The camera application now has built-in panorama mode. Video at 640x480 is plain horrible. The flash on this phone is actually pretty decent. One thing that was very annoying to me is that it uses a very bright focus light(AKA The flash) which makes focusing at macro impossible if you are trying to take a picture of something with brighter colors that reflect more light. There is no way to disable the focus light either, not even in macro mode. Nokia should think about this as well.
BATTERY LIFE: There is simply nothing like it. Except the E71. The battery life on the E72 is also exceptional. I am able to get 2 to 3 days of very heavy usage on it, including 2 to 3 hours of talking, 2 hours of browsing and some text messaging. I have not seen any other phone in this category which gets even close to these stats.
GPS: Works great and it gets a position fix generally within 5 seconds. It seems a little faster than the E71. The E72 also has a compass.
SOFTWARE
This is the bad part.
FP2: Aside from unifying various internet connections I really did not see much if any of an improvement in this version of the Symbian OS. In fact it features some ugly menu transitions and it has a lot of stability issues. You would get out of memory error with a subsequent freezing at least a couple of times in a day and reboots and total freezes which require battery removal are not uncommon either.
APPLICATION UNLOCK: Yes, the phone is hackable with HelloOX 2 and up.
WEB BROWSER: The browser is definitely improved from the E71 afar as rendering and navigation goes. However I was never able to complete even ONE single browsing session without this thing crashing and just exiting in the middle of something. It would have been great if it did not crash.
E-MAIL: About as bad as the client available on my first T-Mobile Pocket PC with Windows Mobile 2002. Although that one was a little better than what Nokia has provided. It is almost 2010 and Nokia still does not have an e-mail client which supports in-line HTML. The Nokia messaging software and service is plain horrible. After 3 days of usage I just cancelled my account and went to using webmail. It is really that bad and this is unacceptable for a supposed "business" device. As an alternative, I would recommend Emoze. Their software even partially supports in-line HTML. If you have Hotmail, you can download Windows Live for Symbian. It works really well.
PODCASTING & INTERNET RADIO: Missing!!!???! Very disappointing.
SIP CLIENT: Missing!!! The SIP settings are there, but there is no client. So forget about gizmo or any similar service unless you are using a third party client like Nimbuzz or Fring.
OFFICE APPLICATIONS: This is one positive category. Quickoffice features a free upgrade to open and edit Office 2007 documents. Nokia has also added Wpresenter, Multiscanner and Font Magnifier as standard applications.
Overall the E72 is a mixed bag for me. It delivers on speed and the browser is well improved but the stability issues, missing software and some other quirks make this device seem like a downgrade. If I was aware of these issues it is likely that I would have stayed with the E71. So if you are in doubt, my advice would be save your money or at least wait for a firmware update which fixes the stability issues. I hope this was helpful.
This review is from: Nokia E72 Unlocked Phone with GPS and Free Voice Navigation -- U.S. Version with Full Warranty (Zodium Black)
Comments