Video: MobileBurn’s Nokia E7 video review. Absolutely beautiful hardware – marred by OS that doesn’t know how to work with humans

E7 reviews are starting to pour in. This time, Michael Oryl from MobileBurn (and AndroidAuthority) reviews the Nokia E7 (in a two part HD video review).

• Display – good blacks, good colours, unfortunately autodimming display (is a little over zealous and you hardly see what the E7’s display can do). Recording outside – really nice display in general.
• 4 – row QWERTY keyboard, keys lined up in grid formation. Things aren’t quite centred the way they ought to be compared to a laptop or desktop computer.  But you get used to it pretty quickly.
• You do have cursor control keys which is kinda nice at times.
• Lock switch pretty handy
• Slider mechanism sometimes a little hard to grab. Kinda have to push in two different directions at the same time. You get used to it but really took me a while to get it working. (Maybe Michael’s has an issue. Once mine gets passed the Sym key it flicks open on its own – one thing I have noticed though is friends who don’t know it has a keyboard can’t open it first time when I tell them there is one – it’s so solid when closed)
• Very clean looking design, very slick looking. Cool design over all.
• Individual homescreens have their own backgrounds which is pretty nice.
• Mail for exchange – not really working that well – I’ll show later…
• Browser – really being quite difficult. Had all sorts of problems with connectivity, not loading site correctly. Seems to be working at the moment – most of the time.  This has really been a horrible experience. (It kills me to hear this, knowing all the praise Nokia once had for Symbian browser during S60 days, and the praise Nokia had with MicroB against every other mobile browser :(  )
• Has flash support – could theoretically watch youtube but not with my bandwidth issues. (Lisa demoed this fine yesterday)
• Really hard to get it to do what I want. Has multitouch zoom – most of the time.
• Installation really slow for apps I’ve tried so far (well, it’s faster than Windows Phone)
• (Michael demoes swype. I have no bloody idea why swype is prioritized in landscape when its the portrait input that requires swype. The keyboard on the E7 does the text input and even the touch keyboard (if you activate prediction correctly) works really well.)
• Camera – it’s not autofocus – it’s eDof so you just take a picture and that’s it. (Well in comparison to my Omnia7 from Samsung, E7 is leaps and bounds better). Really not particularly impressive. (I’m confused – I thought Samsung Focus – USA – was pretty much the Omnia7 in UK. Design is different, and UK has no memory card but I thought everything else identical. In MB’s Focus review they said: “The camera on the Samsung Focus is superb. It can’t match the raw photographic power of Nokia’s N8, but it is otherwise at the top of the heap when it comes to smartphones today.” – Best on the sample photos, I would not go as far as “superb”.)
• – Very quick and somewhat painful look at the Nokia E7.
• Beautiful piece of hardware that is marred by an operating system that just doesn’t know how to work with humans.
• I know there’ll be people out there that don’t agree – many Symbian fans. But I know Nokia agrees, that’s why they’ve decided they’re going to have to move on in a couple of years and try a different operating system (ouch! – we’re moving because of the ‘ecosystem’ not just for the OS/UI)
• Nokia makes some absolutely beautiful hardware and this is a fine example of what the company is capable of doing.
  

Part 2

Category: Eseries, Nokia, Symbian, Video