Nokia E-72. A true Business phone?

No. Not even close. I am going to make this very plain and simple for a regular reader who is looking to buy a new phone and wondering if the Nokia E-72 is worth the 18 grand it sports.

Nokia E-72 has been launched as Nokia’s latest business phone. But it hardly meets the criteria of a business phone.

What I’ll start with is the Mail service, or what everyone knows as Nokia Messaging or Nokia’s Push mail. Now for those who don’t know what Push mail is, It is nothing but an exchange server which is set up by Nokia through which all nokia business phone users can access their email accounts using the IMAP (Internet message access protocol) which every email provider like yahoo, google or MSN offer as an option.

In the earlier days, when push mail was not much of a concept, some people were still smart enough to configure mail box on their Smart phones and use the IMAP services to access their mails on their phone. For example, the way one might use POP3 to access gmail or whatever on their Outlook express.

The only drawback of accessing mail on phone (without push mail) through IMAP is that one has to refresh the inbox manually. Like manually doing send/receive on one’s outlook.

This drawback has now been eradicated by push mail as it instantly pushes the mail received in your gmail or yahoo through the Nokia messaging server to your phone without you having to refresh your phone’s inbox. The first ones to come up with this service were RIM (Research In Motion) commonly known to us as Blackberry.

To use Push mail, one has to get the service activated which in Nokia’s case is Nokia messaging and with Blackberry, its Blackberry. Once the service is activated, you register your mail ID on their server. The standard limit is only 10 email accounts per person and the rules set on the server cannot be changed. These rules are nothing but the rules that define the past dates till which the mails in the inbox, sent items and drafts etc gets synchronized to the phone. Whereas earlier when push mail was not around, the user could manually select the date till which he wanted the mails to be synchronized in his phone depending upon how data intensive his internet access plan was.

Getting back to the point of the new nokia E-72, even though Nokia messaging is free and comes standard with all the new E-series phones, the Nokia messaging client or the user interface installed on the phone is pathetic.

The mails need to be retrieved separately if one wants to view the HTML form of the mail received. The standard view, which is not an HTML one, is like a picture and you read a mail without a cursor following your text. Only the text which is underlined (like email address) or phone numbers are highlighted and can be used however the user wants to use them. Apart from that, no text can be copied or taken up on the clipboard while one is reading the mail. Whereas in a blackberry, a cursor is present to read along the text and is very useful. Also unlike a blackberry, the mailbox in Nokia is not directly merged with the messaging inbox.

Then comes the web browsing. Although it supports flash and everything, the web browsing experience is not good. The whole operating system does not have a common clipboard across all the applications. So even if you could find a web browser in which you can copy text, you would not be able to access the same copied text in for example the notes or the word document. This sometimes is very irritating. Also, applications like skype are not available for Symbian platforms. I am sure there are people out there who have come across a lot of such applications which are available for all good platforms except symbian.

Nokia E72 is not at all stable and does not respond when the signal reception is weak or one is trying to type a mail or trying to perform other tasks like opening the applications menu. Then like a typical nokia, you restart it and it takes a long time to boot while showing you a handshake and everything whereas a blackberry just switches itself on.

The text input is also slow and when the dictionary and auto-correct feature is turned on, it becomes very irritating. So one avoids the use of it. The mail client all in all is not very comfortable to compose long emails. One needs to able to quickly scroll down to the text to which one is replying. This feature has been well taken care of in all the blackberry phones.

What i am trying to convey here is, that these are the small things that make a phone a true business phone. Not a 5MP camera and a pathetic optical navigation key. These are the only things in the E72 that Nokia is charging money for. And this includes an active noise cancellation in the receiver which is quite handy, but quite unjustified.

There is a possibility that someone who can afford a phone worth 20 grand would have a vehicle which will have an AC and would anyways be in a soundproof environment, so there is no point of having that. And if one considers a crowded place or even a disco, the loudness is so much that the person at the other end can hardly hear you even if your phone’s noise cancellation is at its best and you can hear every word of what he is telling you. Then there is the gravity sensor in the E72 which turns the ringer off the moment one flips the ringing phone upside down on a table. This again is a new feature but I don’t think is justified.

Most of the applications that come along with such a hefty price tag are Beta and are under improvement at the cost of poor guys like me who end up buying one.

The advanced call manager that blacklists unwanted calls, is not very good. I have seen such an application work at its best only in a Sony Ericsson business phone. The most unforgettable of which was the Sony Ericsson P1i. In those phones, the blacklisted caller had his connection dropped when he tried to call. where as in nokia, the black list rejects the call which otherwise could also be done manually. What happens then is that the caller hears the ring for a fraction of a second and then the call gets rejected. This makes him feel that the user purposely rejected the call which was not the case with Sony business phones.

And last but not the least, why on earth would one want to have a text recognition software in their phone which allows them to make the phone read what is written in the mail or the message. The E-series has even had an option of saying out the name of the caller who is calling. Which i assure you would not go well if someone with the name Mr. Chandrababu Naidu were to call you. Even worse, if you got call from !xobile from South Africa, the voice inside the phone would have a hard time telling you who is calling. So pass. Even this is not worth charging money for. Because simply, I dont need it.

So its still a long way to go for nokia to establish its product as a good business phone. In the meanwhile, I would say that every executive deserves only a blackberry. No matter how cheap or costly, each blackberry handset is very practical and would never annoy the user. Plus as I fly frequently, I know that no on-board airline crew stops blackberry users from taking out their phones during flights and compose important mails or edit presentations. Which is not the case with any other phone.