The Nokia E72 : First Impressions

We’ve had the Nokia E72 for about 2 days here at ZCJ. The device has big shoes to fill, being the successor to the good ol’ E71 and all.

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What we liked :

• The E72 has great weight to it. Build quality is top notch, as is usual with Eseries.
• The 5 Megapixel camera is pretty decent. Way better than the camera on any Eseries device before. (We’ll go into more detail on this in an upcoming post). The Camera has a panorama mode built-in which is definitely appreciated. For now, you can take a look at some of our Nokia E72 Camera samples on Flickr.

• Has a 3.5 mm standard Audio Jack. About time !
• Charges through micro-USB but also has a standard Nokia charging port.
• Both the microUSB port and microSD port are covered with a hard plastic, matt black inlet.

• Uses the new Nokia Ovi Icons instead of the dreary old Eseries icons of yore.
• Ships with a full license version of QuickOffice and Adobe PDF. Among other apps.
• Has all the Eseries extras that we’ve come to know and love. This includes features like being able to access contacts by typing their name on the homescreen, the one-touch keys, Eseries security features, etc.
• Has power saving mode, which we first saw on the N85 and E75.
• The Qwerty keyboard is great. Some might find the keys a little cramped but if you loved the E71 keys, you’ll love the (slightly bigger) keys on the E72. They have great feedback and there wasnt any lag in typing. The spacebar is shorter than the one on the E71 though.

• The Retail box includes a Leather Cover and Lanyard cable along with an Eseries branded cleaning cloth.
• The Ovi Store is included onboard. In our case it was just a widget that led to downloading the actual Client.
• Our unit shipped with an 8GB microSD. Some units we hear, are shipping with 4GB though.
• The E72 has 240-ish Mb (officially 250Mb) of Internal phone memory available to the user. No memory problems here.
• 128 Mb of Ram. Also, the E72 uses a 600 MHz CPU compared to the E71’s 369 MHz CPU. Multitasking is not a problem on this thing. This also means the Symbian S60v3 Feature Pack 2 OS is very very snappy on the E72. Even WITH the animations turned on.
• The E72 has HSDPA 10.2Mbps down and HSUPA 2Mbps up which is way better than the E71’s HSDPA 3.6Mbps down and no HSUPA.
• The Default Email Client is now a new version of Nokia Messaging, which has been tremendouslyslightly improved over the Nokia Messaging I’ve used on the E75. (We’ll go into more detail on this in an upcoming post)
• The screen is really bright, very crisp and displays 16 Million colours at 320 x 240 Pixels resolution landscape. Copes pretty well with Direct Sunlight. It’s large, at 2.4 inches, it cant help but feel small compared to the Giant-screen Touch devices of today.
• Built-in Accelerometer. W00t ! This means you have features like Flip-phone-to-silence, etc. The Camera doesnt seem to use the accelerometer to correctly orient pictures though.
• Built-in Compass ! Really helps with the Maps Navigation. Ovi Maps v3 is also built in.
• Dedicated Torch, Bluetooth and Silence Keys.

• The Nokia E72 also features built-in Noise Cancellation, which really really helps. Especially if you live in a City as busy (read noisy) as Delhi.
• The back over is Brushed metal which means the E72 isnt a total Fingerprint Magnet like the E71. It still does catch fingerprints a bit though. Only on the Metal parts of course lol.

Battery seems to be on par with the ol’ E71, though it uses the same 1500 mAh (BP-4L) battery.

With Moderate to Heavy usage the E72 lasted almost 2 days. This is with :

• About 2-3 hours of GPS.
• 3 hours worth of calls.
• Backlight on maximum brightness.
• 30 Minutes of Music.
• About 30 minutes of GPRS/Edge usage.
• Email check though Wifi and GPRS every one hour.
• 30 minutes of Installing Apps or Texting (where the screen was constantly on).

The E72 will basically sail through a day of moderate usage. We’re really pleased with the Battery life.

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What we werent too sure about :

• The Optical Navigation Key. You’ll either love it or hate it. We’re still trying to get used to it. But if you cant stand it, you have the option of turning it off.

• The notification icons are now displayed at the bottom of the screen, instead of at the top like most S60v3 devices. Takes some getting used to.
• To autofocus on the E72 you have to rest your finger on top of the Optical Navi key, and press fully to take the picture. This results in a lot of awkward situations when the camera app might start autofocusing while you’re trying to access the camera settings. You cant use the “T” key to autofocus like you would in the E71.
• The in-box microUSB-to-USB cable is really short. Like. Really. Short.
• The Battery cover has the same locking mechanism as the one on the E75, and seems like it might come loose after a couple plays with it.
• The GPS took a bit long to get a lock-on, compared to the N82. It also seemed to loose the GPS signal a couple times. Need to do more testing on this.
• The Loudspeaker is placed at the back of the device. This means it doesnt sound as loud as it should be when placed on a flat surface. It isnt overly loud to begin with.

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What we didnt like :

• No Tv-out. Wouldnt that actually help with business presentations ?
• No dedicated Camera key.
• The Camera app doesnt have Geo-tagging. We suspect this might be added in later with a firmware update, but seriously why isnt this in the shipping firmware ?
• Single LED Flash. Okay so we dont really believe Dual LED Flash makes much of a difference (and dont get us started on how we like Xenon Flashes), but it would have been nice to have here.
• No Podcasting app and No Internet Radio app. Which is strange cause the E71 had these clients. Why remove them ? Wouldnt business people like to listen to a podcast or two during their daily commutes ?
• Video recording has been improved over the E71, but is still at just 15 frames per second (fps).

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So that’s what we think of the Nokia E72 so far. No doubt some things might change by the time we have our full review up. Have any questions about the E72 ? Let us know and we’ll try to answer y’all !

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Author Description

Clinton Jeff

Clinton is currently based in New Delhi, India and is executive editor for UnleashThePhones. He is responsible for all editorial decisions, and covers all forms of Mobile things. Cj is addicted to caffeine, social media, and technology. Always up for a good conversation, you can reach him through the contact form, his website, on Google Plus or on Facebook or Twitter: Follow @clintonjeff

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