I am a satisfied owner of Nokia E50 smartphone (4 year old), which worked on Symbian 1 OS. But when the time came for me to upgrade, I looked around and found a lot of tech reviews favouring Android or iOS. My basic requirements from the phone were good call connectivity & clarity, web connectivity, QWERTY keypad for typing, email support, calendar features, audio video support & a decent camera. One look at the price & the iOS phones went out of the shortlist. However Android phones remained – Samsung & LG phones were in the range of 12-13, 000Rs. However, only LG Optima One had Android’s latest version 2.2. And it did not have a QWERTY keypad. I wasn’t very comfortable with the touchscreen keypads that I checked out.
Therefore I re-looked at tried & trusted Nokia phones, but with the latest Symbian3 OS. Again depending on the price, the shortlist included C6 (with the slide-out QWERTY keypad & Symbain 3), E5 (like a blackberry, with Symbian3) & C6-01 (just launched). C7 & C8 were out of my budget & were only touchscreen phones. I liked C6-01, though a touchscreen, due to its big screen in a compact size, but finally dropped it due to lack of the physical keypad. That left C6 & E5 in the final list. The C6 had two disadvantages – heavy weight & resistive touch screen, which is not as responsive as the capacitive touch screen. So finally it came down to E5 – which felt nice to hold in your palm & had the features I was looking for, at the price I was willing to pay (Rs.10, 300).
It also enabled a nearly seamless transition from my erstwhile E50, as the data transfer was smooth, thanks to a Switch feature in the E5. I’ve been using the phone for the past week or so & find it quite easy to use. Setting up my emails – Gmail, Yahoo – was very easy. Call quality & call connectivity is excellent. Internet connectivity over GPRS is also good & I can also use it with my MTNL wi-fi for speedy browsing at home. The 5MP camera & the media player are handy too. The built in Nokia maps feature is excellent & the integrated Facebook client is also quite useful. The Symbian browser though not excellent, is good enough & supports Flash. Of course I have downloaded Opera Mini for the non-Flash sites. And the keyboard is a joy to use. Along with the form factor, it is one of the best features of the phone. The phone can be connected with the PC through the Ovi suite & the Ovi market has a few useful applications as well. Another excellent feature I have experienced is a long battery life. A full charge easily lasts for two days, with moderate phone & internet usage, including push-mails. The Symbain interface offers a lot of options for customization of the look & feel of the phone. It also offers truly multi-tasking capabilities – just press the Home key & you can jump to any other open application or the main menu from within a running application.
All in all, I am quite satisfied with the E5 so far & have no cause for complaint & it offers me more than the features I was looking for at a reasonable price.
UPDATE :
By downloading Nimbuzz from Ovi Store, it’s possible to chat with friends on multiple chat clients like facebook, google talk, yahoo etc. And with a bit of trial & error on the email sync settings, you can minimise the data charges for the push mail.