Well the latest mobile phone I’ve had the pleasure of trying out from the folks at WOMWorld/Nokia has been the Nokia E72, this reminds me very much of the Nokia E63 I used to own but the E72 is slightly better looking and quite a bit thinner and with a better camera. The black E72 especially which I’ve had looks very similar to a Blackberry, so much so in fact that one of my work colleagues at first glance did actually think it WAS a Blackberry!
Anyway, on to the E72 – as I previously mentioned it is very slim, much more so than it’s forerunner the E63 and as you’d expect from Nokia it looks great, feels good to hold and has an excellent build quality.
The full QWERTY keyboard featured on the E72 is among the best I’ve tried, although it looks cramped once you start composing texts, e-mails or tweets on it you realise what a real pleasure it is to use, the number keys highlighted in light grey above the letters are accessed by holding down the diagonal arrow key in the bottom left hand corner and the symbols are accessed by holding down the key immediately to the right of it marked with a thick arrow pointing upwards. As with all Nokias the predictive text is accurate and excellent and couldn’t really imagine now not using it!
The E72 comes pre-installed with Facebook, YouTube and MySpace, also included is Nokia’s excellent free SatNav application, two games (Block Cascade and Solitaire), Psiloc’s World Traveller, Vlingo (a voice recognition app), Dictionary, Quickoffice (handy for viewing Word and Excel attachments or composing Word and Excel compatible documents on the move), an Adobe PDF reader, a Calendar, Calculator, Music Player and of course, the Ovi Store for downloading additional apps, ringtones and games for your E72, so overall, pretty much everything you could want. However, during my time with the E72 I also downloaded the demo version of Gravity, in my opinion, the BEST Twitter client for Symbian or any mobile OS for that matter – I was glad to have it too as browsing tweets on it is a breeze and it now features support for Foursquare meaning for the first time I was able to start checking-in which is great fun, looking forward to my upgrade at the end of next month so I can start really using it!
Support for Wi-Fi is built in to the E72 also and scanning for Wi-Fi connections can be performed directly from the homescreen.
The E72 boasts a 5 megapixel camera, a huge step up from the E63, which as seems to be the case now with most cameras on Nokias, takes crisp, sharp and excellent quality images. A flash is included which can be toggled on/off as required and a reduce red-eye option is also included.
Overall, I was really impressed with the E72, it’s a definite improvement from the E63 and if there was a greater choice of Symbian apps available I would consider it for my upgrade but will be sticking with either an Android phone or a Blackberry mainly for the increased choice and quality of the apps although I will miss the Gravity app! However if choice of apps is not an issue for you and you want a feature packed, powerful, slim mobile with one of the best QWERTY keyboards around and an excellent camera, you won’t go too far wrong with this! Finally, my grateful thanks as always go to WOMWorld/Nokia for loaning me the E72 to trial for two weeks.
Rating : 4/5
