Nokia E5

Introduction Email used to be a part of the corporate world and now it’s increasingly becoming an essential means of communication for the lot of us – not just the white-collar kind. So if you can’t fight it, the best thing to do is get yourself properly equipped – and the Nokia E5 is the right tool for the job. It’s no old timer either, it knows how to deal with those newfangled social networks as well.

The E5 has skill to match the E72 down to the last spec. OK, almost. Some features have sure taken a hit (what’s with the fixed-focus 5MP camera), but that’s something most people can live with considering the lower price of the E5.

Key features QWERTY messenger bar Quad-band GSM/EDGE Tri-band 3G with 10.2Mbps HSDPA and 2Mbps HSUPA Symbian S60 UI, 3rd edition FP2 600MHz processor, 256MB RAM; 250MB user-accessible storage 2.36" 256K-color QVGA display of excellent sunlight legibility 5 megapixel fixed-focus camera, LED flash VGA video recording at 15fps Wi-Fi b/g; DLNA and UPnP support GPS receiver; Ovi Maps 3.0 with free life-time voice guided navigation Stereo FM radio with RDS, Internet radio Bluetooth (with A2DP) Standard microUSB port (charging) microSD card slot (32GB supported, 2GB included) 3.5mm audio jack Good email and social networking support Office document editor; PDF viewer; ZIP file support Good audio quality Reasonable price Microsoft Office Messenger support Quick Business and Personal homescreen toggle

The Nokia E5 is probably targeted at young people stuck in a corporate environment. Or maybe it’s caught in the trend of more and more companies betting on social networking to boost sales. Whatever the reason, the Nokia E5 has pretty extensive support for social networks and IM chatting to go along with strictly-business offerings like the Microsoft Office messenger.

No matter how good touchscreen input has gotten these last few years, a good old physical QWERTY is still the real deal. Which is why QWERTY messenger bars like the E5 can survive in a world dominated by touch phones.

The high price associated with touch phones (at least the ones with a big enough screen to even consider heavy texting) makes the affordable Nokia E5 a sensible alternative – especially for users who think touchscreen doesn’t make sense in business.

On the next page we’ll take a look just how much you’re getting for the price. Make the jump to see what’s inside the box and a look into the hardware of the E5.

Design and construction The Nokia E5 is not an attention-grabber, but it doesn’t look out of place at work or at home either. The mature, no-nonsense looks can be traced back to the Nokia E63, which served as the prototype for the C3 too.

You should be careful comparing the E5 with top-tier messengers like E71 and E72. They’re obviously in different leagues. What’s important however is that the keyboard and the screen are just as good. The E5 is thicker and doesn’t use as much metal but still offers the solid quality feel that any business phone should.

The Nokia E5 is quite conservative in its choice of paintjobs. The phone is available in Carbon Black, Silver Grey and Chalk White. The Sky Blue and Copper Brown versions add a bit of color to the mix but nothing too flashy that could turn the business crowd away.

The front of the Nokia E5 is all matt plastic that won’t embarrass you by getting all smudgy and greasy. The back is plastic too, except for the battery cover, which is made of metal.

The landscape 2.36" 256K-color display of 320 x 240 pixel resolution takes half of the phone’s face. The QVGA resolution is the norm even for the high-ranking Eseries messengers but the image quality is surprisingly good. Better yet, sunlight legibility won’t let you down either.

Underneath the screen is a spacious navigation deck built around a reasonably tactile D-pad. There are three buttons on either side of the D-pad. Call and End knobs are at the bottom, the two soft keys on top. In between are the Home and Messaging keys.

The soft keys and the D-pad are user-configurable (depending on the homescreen mode). All controls are decently sized and quite comfortable to use.

Speaking of buttons, it’s time to take a closer look at the full QWERTY keyboard. The keys are slightly bigger than the ones on the Nokia E71 keyboard, though they’re not quite as prominent and have a rather short stroke. Still, as far as overall typing is concerned, the E5 is a serious rival of the excellent E71.

One thing the E5 has over the E71 is the torch feature. Pressing and holding the space bar in standby powers up the LED flash on the back so you can use your handset a flashlight. That's a nice little perk and it even overrides the keyboard lock.

Symbian is pleased to serve The Nokia E5 is powered by Symbian 9.3 and runs on the S60 3rd edition user interface with Feature Pack 2.

The E5 uses the so-called Active Standby homescreen. It is available in several different flavors so you can prioritize the set of shortcuts you need on the screen.

The Basic layout just shows you the wallpaper (and the usual status indicators of course) and you can assign shortcuts to the D-pad directions. The Vertical icon bar layout has four tabs - shortcuts, calendar, music player and personalization and it doesn't hide much of the wallpaper.

The other three layouts are more elaborate. They offer several rows of “homescreen applications” (e.g. upcoming events from the calendar, received emails and so on) along with shortcuts.

The Horizontal icon bar is the most basic of the three. You get a row of six customizable shortcuts at the top of the screen, below are email, calendar, Ovi Chat and WLAN notifications (they also act as shortcuts to their respective apps).

When the music player (or the radio) is on, a new row is displayed with the track info.

The Active layout is the good old Active Standby that was on the Nokia E71/E72 and others. It looks like the Horizontal layout, but tucks in an analog clock on the left of the screen and lets you customize what rows to appear under the shortcut toolbar.

There are 15 different options to choose from (e.g. missed calls, voice mail, to-dos and so on). You could turn them all on, but only five are visible at any time and you can’t scroll up and down to see the rest.

Typical E-series, there the Business and Personal modes for this layout. They allow you to quickly switch between two sets of shortcuts and homescreen apps – one with business apps at hand, the other, say, with Twitter and Facebook shortcuts.

The other option is the Contact bar layout, which has been available on Nokia handsets for quite a while too. It puts a row of favorite contacts on top three homescreen applications - Calendar, WLAN wizard, Ovi Contacts – along with the usual six customizable shortcuts (this time at the bottom).

The Favorite contacts are placed on top, each represented by the contact photo and their first name. Four contacts are visible at a time and you can scroll left and right for the rest. The music player traditionally has a tab for the homescreen – but because the space is limited, it usually ends up replacing the Calendar tab.

There’s one final layout – the Talking theme. It enhances accessibility by reading out loud the option you’ve selected.

As with all Symbian phones, there is a built-in voice recognition system. It does a good job, being fully speaker-independent.

The Symbian task manager appears on every pop-up menu. It's actually placed on top of every list, which can be a little irritating at times, considering you can still invoke it with the well-known shortcut of pressing and holding the Menu key (the one with the House pictogram).

The Nokia E5 is powered by a 600MHz CPU with 256MB RAM, which is plenty for a Symbian smartphone. The UI is speedy and the battery lasts quite a while between charges, the only lags we noticed concern some transition effects when going through the menus.

A good phonebook Symbian handsets have an excellent phonebook. There is storage space for a practically unlimited number of contacts and fields with all the available memory potentially usable for the purpose. Contacts can be freely ordered by first or last name and can naturally be searched by gradual typing of any of the names.

Editing a contact offers a great variety of preset fields and you can replicate each of them as many times as you like.

Personal ringtones and videos can also be assigned to a contact. If you prefer you may group your contacts and give each group a specific ringtone.

Synchronization is also nice and easy although you do need the Ovi Suite for things to go smoothly. Sending and receiving contacts via SMS or Bluetooth is also a piece of cake.

The Call log on the Nokia E5 is organized and efficient, typical Symbian. It holds up to 20 call records in each of the tabs for outgoing, received and missed calls. These are all accessed by pressing the Call key on the homescreen.

A good phonebook Symbian handsets have an excellent phonebook. There is storage space for a practically unlimited number of contacts and fields with all the available memory potentially usable for the purpose. Contacts can be freely ordered by first or last name and can naturally be searched by gradual typing of any of the names.

Editing a contact offers a great variety of preset fields and you can replicate each of them as many times as you like.

Personal ringtones and videos can also be assigned to a contact. If you prefer you may group your contacts and give each group a specific ringtone.

Synchronization is also nice and easy although you do need the Ovi Suite for things to go smoothly. Sending and receiving contacts via SMS or Bluetooth is also a piece of cake.

The Call log on the Nokia E5 is organized and efficient, typical Symbian. It holds up to 20 call records in each of the tabs for outgoing, received and missed calls. These are all accessed by pressing the Call key on the homescreen.

Telephony Signal reception is good on the Nokia E5, though we did get an occasional dropped call in areas of very poor coverage. In-call voice quality is great with loud, crisp sound. Vibration is also strong enough to make sure you never miss an incoming call or message.

Smart dialing, a staple of the Eseries is of course available on the E5.

Corporate messaging can do Twitter too The Nokia E5 has great messaging capabilities. With a comfortable QWERTY keyboard and solid software support, managing your correspondence is as good as it gets on this kind of devices.

The E5 handles all common message types - SMS, MMS and email. It also supports more specialized ones like Microsoft Office Communicator (which is a replacement for the Microsoft Exchange Messaging server) and the most popular social networking platforms.

Texts and MMS share an editor. Things are pretty straightforward here so you’ll get the hang of it right away.

The email client is also quite similar to what previous Symbian powered phones have offered. The app can automatically detect the settings for over 1000 email service providers, all you have to do is enter your username and password.

There is support for attachments, signatures and basically most of the things you can think of, so the Nokia E5 can meet almost any emailing needs. There’s even a preinstalled document viewer on the E5 so you can view attached office files.

The Microsoft Office Communicator is available through the Contacts app in two separate tabs. Each company can set up their own Communications Server, which allows for IM style chatting with co-workers. This covers group chats, showing personal availability and also quick ways to email or call a contact.

If you’ve been using some IM program for work, the Communicator comes as a “serious” replacement. It’s available for select other Nokias (both S60 and S40) – check the Ovi Store.

The Nokia E5 also supports Ovi Chat, which is a part of Ovi Contacts, as well as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace – we’ll cover those in their own sections.

Ovi Contacts for personal chatting The Ovi Contacts app comes preinstalled on the Nokia E5 but you can also install it on most other Nokia smartphones. It integrates tightly with the Contact list and you can easily switch between the two.

Contacts are synced with the Ovi cloud (along with calendar items and notes) and they can either be existing Ovi Contacts or G-Talk users (that’s Google’s own IM service, which is also integrated into Gmail).

Thanks to the Ovi Contacts and Ovi Chat integration, you will be able to chat in real time with all your Ovi/Google Talk-connected contacts, change your status messages and mood, and all that kind of social stuff.

Ovi Contacts can also be used to share the name and artist info of the track you’re currently playing. Using the built-in GPS receiver, it can share your location too.

While you probably don’t have many contacts using Ovi for chat, chances are quite a few of them have a Gmail account and they can use that to chat with you. They could use iGoogle as well or a desktop client such as G-Talk. Multi-protocol clients can usually handle G-Talk too.

Great image gallery The image gallery used on the Nokia E5 is the Nseries Gallery that’s been around for quite a while. It offers all the needed functionality and works quite fast.

Zooming and panning are fast and smooth even for 5MP photos. Not that we expected anything different from a 600MHz processor pushing images to a QVGA screen.

Using the Home Media app, you can easily share photos, videos and music from your phone over Wi-Fi with DLNA capable devices and also play files from those devices directly on the Nokia E5.

A decent music player There’s little diversity in Symbian music players – the one on the Nokia E5 is the exact same one found on Xseries devices (not that it’s a reason to complain in this case). It handles the most common audio formats - MP3, AAC, eAAC+ and WMA, and the standard 3.5mm audio jack is a welcome perk.

Audio quality is great Nokia E5 is rather quiet when headphones are attached but provides one of the cleanest outputs we have seen so far. It did greatly in every aspect of our test and given its price rage, that’s a pretty good achievement.

The frequency response is perfect and none of the other readings is anything to frown at either. From noise levels through dynamic range and distortion levels to stereo crosstalk, the readings are just great, comparable to the best in class.

Video player does the job Nokia E5 features Real player (as Symbian phones typically do). You can browse and watch your videos in the gallery, file manager and the Video Centre – they’ll be handled by the Real player either way, the only difference will be in the layout and the browsing experience.

With such a small screen though, video playback is not this phone's strongest suit. And to confirm that, you'll need to install a third-party player if you want a taste of DivX/XviD video.

FM radio with RDS and Internet radio The FM radio on Nokia E5 has a nice simple interface and can automatically scan and save the available stations in your area. RDS is supported of course.

And if you get bored with local radio stations, you can switch on the Internet radio and listen to a long list of stations broadcasting on the World Wide Web. Station directories are available per country and per genre so finding something you like wouldn’t be a problem.

Keep in mind that Internet radio uses your phone’s data connection, so make sure it fits your data plan. The connection bitrate can help reduce traffic if you’re not on an unlimited plan.

The Shazam app is available and ready to perform TrackID duties if you need it.

5-megapixels on fixed focus The Nokia E5 is equipped with a 5 megapixel fixed-focus camera for a maximum image resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels. It has a LED flash but no lens protection whatsoever. This means that the glass covering the lens is prone to finger smudges and perhaps occasional scratches.

The camera is the first 5MP snapper without autofocus we’ve seen so far. The E5 is not a camera phone by any means, it’s what you use when you’ve forgotten your point and shoot camera.

As far as settings go, the camera on the E5 offers several scene presets, one of which is user defined. There's limited control over light sensitivity (it has low, medium, high and auto settings) as well as some control over sharpness and contrast.

The bar on the right side of the screen hosts a set of shortcuts to various camera settings. You can add and remove shortcuts so you can have quick access to the settings that matter to you – adding to a total of 16 viewfinder shortcuts.

The rest of the settings include flash control, self-timer (2, 10, 20 seconds), night mode, automatic panorama mode and multi shot.

There's also a Sequence mode to let you capture consecutive images at a predefined interval (from 10 seconds to 30 minutes).

The image quality is below the best of the 5MP range but still, the Nokia E5 produces, some quite usable photos. The contrast and color rendering are good and the amount of captured detail is decent. However, the produced images are quite noisy, which combined with the sharpening algorithm, produces jagged edges. The noise reduction algorithm also has a tendency to smear out areas of low contrast.

The major missing feature – autofocus – becomes apparent when you try to take a macro shot. Anything closer than 50cm is a no-go.

Video recording As for video recording, the Nokia E5 shoots in VGA resolution at 15 fps. Videos are MPEG-4 encoded. Although the specs sound decent, the quality is quite poor actually. The compression is dialed a bit too high, which brings the effective resolution down, and the modest framerate brings down the quality even further.

Good connectivity The Nokia E5 has all the connectivity basics covered – quad-band GSM/EDGE make sure that if there’s a GSM network around you can connect to it. Tri-band 3G is also available and offers blazing fast speeds – 10.2Mbps HSDPA and 2Mbps HSUPA.

The E5 has Bluetooth covered too – v2.0 with A2DP – and also Wi-Fi b/g (no 802.11n support though). You can also tick the UPnP and DLNA checkboxes.

The microUSB port can be used both for charging and for data connections. In the case of the Nokia E5, this will probably be the quickest way to transfer a few files to the microSD card, since it’s hidden under the battery.

The browser is great, the screen not so much Browsing the Internet on the Nokia E5 is as good as it gets on a non-touch phone. Even the most elaborate pages are rendered well.

For navigation you get a virtual mouse cursor and a mini-map, which can help you find your way around large sites where lots of scrolling is required. The mini-map activates automatically if you scroll longer, and you can use it as an overview.

The zoom level is also easily adjustable and searching for text on a page is straightforward. Scrolling, panning and zooming are fast in all but the most complex pages.

The large amount of RAM (256MB in this case) though means that you’re unlikely to get any “Out of memory” error even for content-rich websites.