Review: Nokia E5

The Nokia E5 is a recent addition to Nokia's business E-series phones, and features a full qwerty keyboard, and a business-driven set of features.

Its look is plain and functional, but the E5 is brilliantly designed with comfortable, easy-to-hold curved edges, and nicely rounded buttons that make input easy. Although predominately made of plastic, it has a good, solid feel, and weighs only about 126g.

Similarly to Nokia's other messaging phones, the E5 runs the Series 60 third edition OS, which allows the user to do a lot, but in a slightly awkward fashion, forcing the user to do a lot of clicking about on the D-pad to navigate around the user interface. However, Nokia has tried to ease this pain through shortcuts which work really well.

I found the call quality to be excellent and the mono speakers at the back plenty loud enough. Another real sell for me is the battery life. Even with heavy usage on the Internet, calls, photos, it lasts around a day-and-a-half.

The home screen also features a contact bar, that lets the user add photo contacts, RSS feeds, call and message alerts and suchlike. It also features e-mail, chat notifications, app shortcuts and search.

Moreover, it has several pre-installed apps, and several worth mentioning are YouTube, Dictionary, Active Notes and the Ovi Store.

The device features a 2.36-inch QVGA display, has a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels and supports 256 000 colours, a lot less than its predecessor, the E72. It also has an internal vibra-antenna and ambient light sensor that controls the screen brightness according to the surrounding light. The screen is a little low-res, but I found it more than sufficient for my needs.

Although reasonably priced, the phone enjoys connectivity features such as Bluetooth, WiFi, 3G and GPRS. Its browser is very smooth, and fast, supporting full HTML and WAP 2.0.

It comes with a Facebook client that integrates really well with the phone. It also supports IM for Yahoo, G-Talk, and Windows Live Messenger. Its Nokia Messaging client supports Yahoo Mail, Gmail and Ovi Mail as well as SMTP, IMAP4 and POP3.

The one feature that I found a let-down was the camera. The E5 features a 5MP camera with 3x digital zoom and LED flash, which I would have thought would have taken some reasonable pics. However, I found the pictures too grainy and unclear, and the lighting extremely hard to get right. Having said that, the camera is fast, with a snappy interface. It also offers some excellent features such as burst mode, panorama mode and a very useful self-timer.

The video camera records videos at a standard 15fps with options varying between 320 x 240 and 640 x 480 in MP4 format.

Where the phone redeemed itself again, was in its Music Player, which plays MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+ and WMA files. It also gives the option of allowing downloaded podcasts to be listened to from the player itself.

I would highly recommend the Nokia E5 to any user who favours a qwerty keypad, and who needs a solid phone that can handle e-mail, Internet and other business functions. Although the BlackBerry is considered to be the definitive business phone, the E5 steps up, and provides an excellent, and highly affordable alternative.