Nokia E5 – A Cheaper E72

It’s rare that consumers are treated with great value products. The mobile phone community has reason to rejoice with the new Nokia E5 which the Finish mobile phone giant is positioning as its most affordable E-series smartphone. That may not mean much unless you look closer at its data specs and press release to realize it’s the rightful successor to a more expensive E63 and carries many of the features of an even more expensive E72.

Minus the svelte 10mm thinness of the E72, the E5 even looks like one. But with all that in the same Blackberry styled full QWERTY candybar measuring 115 x 58.9 x 12.8 mm and weighing a pocket friendly 126g, the E5 gets a launch price of €180 compared to the €350 launch price of the E72. If that isn’t great value, nothing is. Find the best Nokia E5 deals online through comparison websites.

What you Get and Give up for the Price

For €180, Nokia is taking its E5 to a wider market that pines for E72 features, or at least most of it, at nearly half the price. Admittedly, you have to suffer some trifle compromises. For starters, you won’t get the svelte 10mm waistline of the E72. The Nokia E5 loses the 16 millions color depth on the same conventional 2.4-inch landscape TFT LCD display with QVGA resolution.

You only get 256k colors. You won’t miss that but for sure you’d miss the gravity accelerometer, the optical trackpad and the scroll bar the E72 has. Talk times are shorter by 4 hours with a less muscled 1200 mAh battery but still delivering a respectable 8.5 hours of talk time. You can find the best deal for the E5 when you compare phone deals.

Its camera gives up autofocus on the 5-megapixel resolution with LED flash. But your fixed focus lens gets EDoF (Extended Depth of Field) that makes your shots look superior to similar fixed focus 5-megapixel cameras. In the multimedia department, everything is basically E72 except playback support for 3GP video and M4A audio files. But that can easily be remedied with 3rd party players that do.

The Nokia E5 also loses the preloaded document reader and digital compass support on the E72. But the E5 is one messaging powerhouse with IM support for Yahoo Messenger, Ovi Chat, Google Talk and Windows Live messenger. Email apps galore with Gmail, Yahoo and Windows Live Hotmail with support for MS Exchange and IBM Lotus Traveler. You can find the best Nokia contracts from online retailers.

As a smartphone, the E5 runs the Symbian v9.3 OS with S60 3.2 UI on the same 600 MHz ARM11 engine the E72 has. It even gets the same 250 MB phone memory but twice the 128 RAM on the E72. Its microSD expandability is also twice the 16 GB on the E72.

The Nokia E5 is your quad band GSM with class 32 GPRS/EDGE data speeds and is also a 3G phone on the tri band UMTS with HSDPA at 10.2 Mbps and HSUPA 2 Mbps. Hotspot surfing is supported from its WiFi 802.11b/g with UPnP and DLNA. It also gets local wireless data transfers via Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP and a wired option via microUSB 2.0. SatNav functionality gets an integrated GPS receiver with A-GPS support and is preloaded with Ovi Maps 3.4 with lifetime free navigation.