Video: MobileTechReview’s Nokia E7 review: Gorgeous hardware – can’t beat it. Symbian^3 not terrible experience but not top notch.

The respected Lisa from MobileTechReview reviews the Nokia E7.

• 4″ AMOLED display, very bright and colourful, quite sharp.
• Resolution (nHD) highest for Nokia. Not gonna beat higher end phones on market like iPhone 4 and high end Androids- but for Nokia, that’s pretty much where they top out for phones (N900? And only iPhone 4 has had higher resolution than Nokia’s touch screens. Prior to that, the likes of 5530 had higher resolution than the 3GS, 3G, 2G)
• Beautiful hardware, metal casing.
• Camera – typical of Nokia, it takes awesome pictures. (By market standards, the E7 does take really good pictures – because competition takes crappy photos)
• Really excellent keyboard. Beautiful hardware design. Lovely curves and angles. Excellent hinge feel. Very solid and very nice.
• Really, IT’S HARD TO BEAT NOKIA ON THE HARDWARE FRONT.
• Pretty nice music player that Nokia makes.
• For a Symbian Phone (the processor) is fine. Runs perfectly adequate.
• (Checking out movie trailer streaming playback) It’s a nice display (it looks green screened, no? Like the video is an actual video playing on screen not on the E7)
• Checking out the web browser – one point where Nokia was the REAL leader. (sadface. They still are if you think Maemo 5 and MicroB. Hmmp. Darn you Nokia and the crappy Symbian browser). They’ve kinda fallen behind a bit so let’s see what this one does.
• Browser is reasonably fluid at scrolling. Font could be sharper but that’s Nokia’s default font. They’re introducing a new one too.
• Full flash doesn’t work so well. Some integrated youtube browsing not working.  Mobile youtube fine.
• iTunes art sliding music interface which is nice.
• Ovi Maps – free turn by turn direction.
• GPS gets a fix very quickly. Can pinch and zoom. In terms of POIs (points of interest) it’s not going to compete with Google and Bing (well, when the latter combines with Ovi Maps, it’ll be an even bigger threat to google maps. Ovi Maps is unbelievably useful now. On N8/E7 they are just too reliable for me).
• Conclusion: Gorgeous piece of hardware. Can’t beat it. Keyboard is wonderful. Voice quality is wonderful too.  But in terms of operating System, S^3 really has fallen behind, not just iOS but Android as well as Palm’s WebOS (well the Symbian UI has. The OS itself is still leaps and bounds over others) The Web Browser is Not all that it could be (you’re telling me. How many thousands of people are working on Symbian’s browser to produce that piece of shit?). Not a terrible experience but it’s not top notch.

Category: Nokia, Symbian, Video