Nokia E7 review
Nokia's last gasp Symbian smartphone, the E7, is here. Does it go out in a blaze of glory or is it a damp squib? Julian Prokaza finds out in our review.
A few fiddly aspects aside, the Nokia E7 is a lovely piece of hardware, but the Symbian^3 operating system is just out of its depth when compared to the competition — and the fact that Nokia has also lost faith in Symbian is hardly encouraging either. So, unless the operating system is inexplicably a must-have for operational purposes, either the Android-powered HTC Desire Z or the Windows Phone 7 Dell Venue Pro are far superior hardware keyboard-equipped alternatives.
Keyboard side, the Nokia E7 has a flush-fitting button on its top edge that provides the usual Symbian options for powering off and switching profiles, plus a metallic slider on the left for quickly locking and unlocking the screen. There's a similar slider on the right for the volume control, plus a button that activates digital camera mode and then works as a shutter release. Lastly, a wide button below the screen returns the Symbian Home screen when pressed in any application, and brings up a list of installed apps when pressed at the Home screen itself.
The image quality of photos taken with camera is best described as average. The eight-megapixel photos look little better than those from lower resolution smartphone cameras.
The 4in AMOLED screen on the E7 looks great. It's bright and vibrant, but the 640 x 360 pixel resolution seems a little meagre with 800 x 480 displays now commonplace, even if it still renders text relatively crisply. The capacitive glass screen feels fine under the finger, but the super-snappy response that's a trademark of iOS and (to a lesser degree) Android is absent and that's where the E7's problems really lie.
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