Nokia E5 Review

Introduction:

The Nokia E5 is the latest in a long line of business oriented Eseries phones, and directly follows on from the Nokia E72 with its QWERTY keyboard, landscape screen and business oriented feature-set. While most people still regard BlackBerries as the definitive business handsets, both the Nokia E71 and E72 were extremely well received. With the Nokia E5 offering similar utilities and form-factor as the E72, but at a lower price-point, have Nokia retained all the key strengths in the E5, or have they stripped it of too many features in a bid to keep the price down?

Design:

Sporting a predominantly plastic body, with the exception of its battery cover, the Nokia E5 looks extremely fit for purpose. The E5 appears more straight-laced than the E72, with no design enhancements such as chrome-like trimmings to differentiate it from the array of handsets with a similar form-factor currently on the market. Despite the plastic body, the Nokia E5 still however manages to provide a solid feel, decent weighting, curved edges that feel comfortable to hold, and all in a relatively slim-line device.



You can compare the Nokia E5 with many other phones using our Size Visualization Tool.

The Nokia E5's screen does what it needs to do, without any frills. At 2.4 inches and with a resolution of 320x240, it provides adequate size and sharpness for most tasks such as messaging and editing short documents, though it is less than ideal for web browsing and watching movies on. Viewing angles on the phone are great and the screen is also very bright. Both these factors help make the screen more usable for long periods, and the landscape orientation lends itself to business oriented tasks (such as text entry, Bloomberg and sorting through emails). While the Nokia E5 displays less colours than the E72 (256,000 instead of 16,700,000), when considering the E5's business oriented end-use, this is a logical sacrifice that won't hamper usability.

The QWERTY keyboard is perhaps the Nokia E5's key selling point. Being a four tiered layout, it is comprehensive enough in terms of what it offers, however is small and a little cramped. The keys are rubberised and feel tactile enough to facilitate decent typing speeds. The biggest detractor surrounding the keyboard's usability isn't so much its size however, but the shape of the QWERTY keys. Being raised only in the centre, pressure needs to be applied to a very specific point in order to click each key. While this is something that can be gotten used to, it doesn't provide as intuitive a typing experience as we had hoped it would, and simply isn't comfortable if you have larger fingers.  


The rest of the device is for the most part standard. With the front mainly sporting the screen and the QWERTY keypad, it also houses a call and end buttons along with two soft-keys, two shortcut keys (menu and messaging) and a four-way d-pad (instead of the optical pad found on the E72). There is no front facing camera unlike on the E72. On the back of the Nokia E5, you will find a 5MP camera with an LED flash and a mono speaker, with the top containing a microUSB port, a standard Nokia charging port and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Both sides have a battery release button on their respective lower halves and the right side also has a volume rocker at the top. The only physical feature that is uncomfortable to use is the volume-rocker, which isn't sufficiently raised and is aggravatingly stiff to press.

Interface:

The Nokia E5 runs Symbian S60 v3 (or 3rd Edition), as the E72 before it, and the E71 before that, as well as the E61 before that. This isn't to say Symbian is a bad thing, however, with minimal visual evolution over the generations, even for a business phone with minimal flourish, the Nokia E5's interface looks extremely dated. As usable as ever though, Symbian places most of what you would expect to find, where you would expect to find it, with a few counter-intuitive niggles which include the inability to edit home-screen shortcuts without wading through layers of repeated menus, and it being all too easy to turn off the phone by mistake.

For further details, the OS has been looked at closely in a number of other reviews so we won't dwell on it here, but suffice to say, it performs adequately, with phonebook access tying in nicely with the QWERTY input and all the standard calendar and organizer functions working well.



Connectivity and Data:

With quad-band GSM and tri-band 3G, Wi-Fi, A-GPS and Bluetooth 2.1, the Nokia E5 provides a good platform to compete with other business devices when it comes to connectivity, even winning-out in a number of areas. At a very reasonable price-point and with a familiar form-factor that works, the E5 comes loaded with SyncML, push email onboard, support for Exchange servers, making staying connected a primary concern. The phone also ships with Nokia’s new networking apps such as Ovi Chat, and Ovi Contacts, and while these are yet to take off in the same way as BBM or Gtalk, they are nevertheless useful to have if, say, an entire office is kitted out with E5s or other Nokia handsets.

Web browsing using the on-board Symbian browser is okay, if slightly awkward. While it was good 2 years ago, usable last year, the small, low res screen coupled with the lack of a touch-screen make everything about the experience feel particularly dated in this day and age given the current line-up of web-browsers.


Apps and support on the Nokia E5 include Bloomberg, Lotus Notes Traveller, Quickoffice, Facebook, YouTube, MySpace, Twitter, Ovi Files, Ovi Contacts, Ovi Sync, Friendster and Ovi Chat out of the box.

Camera and Multimedia:

In addition to the 5MP sensor, the Nokia E5's camera has an LED flash, though no auto-focus. With no camera button, it's not an instant access feature, however once activated, it's all very snappy. The Nokia E5 even offers some more advanced photo features such as self-timer, panorama mode and burst mode (albeit slow bursts of 6 shots). Image quality isn't bad for a camera with no AF, especially with objects over a meter and a half away with good overall levels of detail. While the LED flash isn't going to light up a whole room, it does help brighten up dark subjects.







Videos taken on the device playback well on its screen, appearing well suited to the relatively low pixel count, yet don't fare quite as well on high-res monitor. Recording options are 15fps at 320x240 and 640x480 in MP4 format. As with photo-taking, there are some nice options such as white-balance and colour tone that can be adjusted when taking video.



The Nokia E5's on-board MP3 player is the standard Symbian fare and is a piece of cake to use, offering quick access to your favourite tracks with minimum hassle and plays MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+ and WMA files. There is also an on-board FM radio. Sound quality from decent headphones connected to the E5 was good, if slightly lacking in bass. While we were testing the phone, through both the Symbian music player and Spotify, it replaced out main MP3 player for periods of listening of up to an hour. The biggest point of contention with the music experience on the Nokia E5 is the volume rocker - it's very stiff and not raised enough for comfortable use.



The mono speaker on the back is a pretty good performer, with adequate volume levels, clarity was also better than some lower end units, making it ideal for use as a speaker phone.

Performance:

Fortunately, the Nokia E5 has retained the same 600MHz processor of the E72, therefore the phone has no trouble coping with multi-tasking multiple apps at once.

In-call quality was extremely clear. When making a call from the Nokia E5, volume was audible and there was minimal background interference. Receiving a call on the phone wasn't quite as sharp as we might have hoped, however, with adequate volume levels, conversations are still perfectly audible. The main problem we had was weaker than average 3G reception. It seemed far less reliable than any other handset tested in the same area. While this isn't an issue in some areas, it did manage to detract slightly from the overall experience.

Quoted at 7.5 hours of talk time and 625 hours of standby time, practically speaking, with moderate to heavy use of Wi-Fi, MP3 player and email, we found ourselves charging our Nokia E5 every one to two nights.

Conclusion:

We would be happy to recommend the Nokia E5. With a slightly more lackluster finish at a more appealing price-tag than its E72 sibling, and most other similarly classed phones, it certainly does the key things it needs to do pretty well. The slightly unrefined finish of the Nokia E5 does crop up from time to time, with the screen resolution, cramped keypad and awkward volume-rocker occasionally hindering use. The interface could also use a revamp as it's been looking dated for a while now. That said, for considerably less than a BlackBerry, the Nokia E5 offers a good feature-set at a decent price. QWERTY alternatives to the Nokia E5 with similar specs would be the considerably more expensive BlackBerry Bold 9700, or the Android-powered Motorola Milestone 2, the latter of which has a much larger keyboard layout. If your sights are set on something at a similar price-point, another QWERTY device to consider would be the Xperia X10 mini pro, with less of a business orientation, but the versatility of Android nonetheless.

Nokia E5 Video Review: