Nokia E5 – A Smartphone for Everyone

Nearly everyone can guess the prices of business smartphones like those Blackberry and HTC handsets and they certainly are not for everyone. But Nokia’s messaging smartphones in the E-series are often priced more affordably. They even attract the more youthful crowd with a styling that comes in a bevy of body colors.

Considered the successor to the slightly more upscalish E63, the new Nokia E5 surprises Nokia’s mid markets with a handset that is sure to appeal even to budget conscious people with a wallet-friendly launch price of €180 before taxes.

Combining nearly all the features of its predecessor plus a few from the more expensive E72, the E5 pushes the envelope for value smartphones. Its Blackberry-ish form factor even comes in carbon black, calk white, sky blue, silvery grey and copper brown.

For starters, the Nokia E5 carries one of the few fixed focus cameras using EDoF (Extended Depth of Field) lens that while on paper may show the same 5-megapixel resolution and LED Flash, actually results in better looking shots, indoors and out. Compared with the E72, the E5 only loses the autofocus function.

In the display department, a QVGA resolution on a 2.4-inch TFT LCD screen with 256k colors betrays a budget handset losing the 16 million color support of the E72, its optical trackpad and scroll bar along the way.

But the Nokia E5 edges out many foot soldiers with peanut brains and comes out ahead with a 250 MB onboard memory as well as 256 MB of RAM for its Symbian OS v9.3 with S60 Rel 3.2 UI running on a powerful ARM11 CPU clocked at 600 MHz. This is the same OS and CPU on the E72 but have twice the RAM at 256 MB and twice the microSD memory expandability at 32 GB from the E72’s 16 GB.

Business phones have traditionally been weak in mobile entertainment but the E-series takes exception. The E5 features a stereo FM radio with RDS and the capable audio player for MP3, WAV, WMA and eAAC+ formats as well as the video players for MP4, H.263/H.264 and WMA video codecs. You get stereo listening options over its 3.5mm audio jack or you can go wireless stereo using its A2DP profile support over Bluetooth.

The Nokia E5 enjoys 3G network coverage on its tri band UMTS (900 / 1900 / 2100) with data connectivity speeds of 10.2 Mbps on HSDPA and 2 Mbps on HSUPA. It’s also a quad band GSM (850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900) on 2G with class 32 GPRS/EDGE data speeds of up to 296 Kbps. It gets hotspot support from its WiFi 802.11b/g with UPnP and DLNA for up to 54 Mbps i8nlcuding Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP and microUSB 2.0 for high speed local data transfer and syncing. Its integrated GPS receiver with A-GPS support comes with Ovi Maps 3.4 preloaded with free lifetime navigation services.

Software wise, the Nokia E5 fires its social networking munitions with a Facebook status feature on the phonebook with one click access to Facebook and Twitter. As a business phones, it gets preloaded with all the messaging tools like Ovi Mail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail as well as IM tools like Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger and Ovi Chat. It also comes with MS Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes Traveler. The Ovi Store is pre-installed for quick downloading of games and apps. Find the best Nokia E5 deals at Moby1 when you compare mobile phone deals from the latest mobile phone with free gifts.