Quick impressions of the Nokia E72

I took advantage of a recent sale on Dell.com and purchased a Nokia E72 for a friend of the family. I was allowed to take it out of the box and I have used it with my sim card on two occasions.



I like the design and feel of the E72. It fits much better in my pocket than my N97. The color scheme is great, but I often forget where the call and end keys are since they have no color. I like that the battery cover is much more simpler than the E71, although it is quite a fingerprint magnet. Having a 3.5mm headphone jack on top fixes a major design flaw of the E71. I love how it charges via both micro USB as well as 2mm Nokia jack.

The keyboard has a great feel and is easy to type on. The predictive text I found useful. The optical pad is more harmful than helpful. In general use, it often does things wrong or gets in the way of navigating menus. It is fantastic when using it for the camera or web browsing. Playing with the sensitivity helps a bit. I wish there was a way to select what apps it works in.

The battery life is phenomenal. I left it offline for a week and was surprised to see 5 bars left when I put my sim back in. I took it out Saturday night and was geotagging my tweets and pics, using Ovi Maps and sending texts all night and used up only 1 bar.

Taking pictures is fun with the optical pad acting as a focus. The flashlight feature I found convenient. I love that I could flip the E72 to silence it when it makes noise. I haven't run into the constant freezes people online have complained about. Maybe I haven't used it enough.

I don't like how the menus are organized. There's a ton of sub-folders which have icons that don't look like folders. It is very hard to change settings.

I did very much enjoy the software updates available. I was able to update the firmware and Ovi Maps over the air with ease.



That said, a lot of mistakes were made moving from v20 to v30. Theme effects are off. I love the effects and diving deep into menus to turn them back on is not fun.

One thing I don't understand is why Nokia gives you nice wallpapers but doesn't enable them. The E72 comes with a nice selection of animal wallpapers from the World Wide Fund for Nature. The E72 also has the ability to have multiple fullscreen backgrounds. This should be enabled by default instead of just using the default theme.

My final beef is with the email client. Email is never instant and there's no way to turn on html email by default. This is the core feature of the E72 and should be fixed.

For all those cons, the E72 still makes a great phone and I am looking forward to setting my dad up with one.