Nokia’s E72 is the bomb in zodium black

Nokia’s new business handset provides work-life balance in a great feeling, high performing phone – available in any colour as long as its black…review by Fiona Hanlon

It is fair to say that the new Nokia E72 feels like a piece of genius engineering.

It’s stylish, ‘zodium black’, QWERTY keyboard design sits firmly in the smartphone camp. It is unashamedly a business-orientated smart-phone guaranteeing fast and reliable telephony and messaging services but not without its multi-media capabilities.

The E72 supersedes the E71 (which itself was considered a breakthrough-phone) and it does in fact improve on its position through better keyboard design an integrated optical pad, improved camera specs to 5.0MP, increased processor speed, twice the amount of ROM and a very impressive battery life.

The handset comes boxed with a leather case that makes carrying it around safer, and protects it from getting scratched. The box also contains the usual charger, headset, USB cable, hand strap and user guide. The device boasts a respectable 2.4” QVGA screen, and the bevelled keys add to its ease of use.

There seems to be some debate over the benefits of the new Optical Navi key which is found in the d-pad and from which you flick your thumb over to move the cursor onscreen. Personally, I liked it – it has a dainty feel to it, but if you don’t like navigating around your phone like that you simply turn it off.

One of the things that made the E71 so popular was the introduction of Nokia Messaging (now being renamed to Ovi Messenger) allowing you to receive your private and work emails into separate profiles, the E72 has supposedly smoothed out the set-up process further by installing a wizard that does all this for you. However, if you listen to some of the critics the wizard function may well be flawed as there is some general unease about some of the firmware that the E72 has been released with, and there are cries from the ether for the software to meet 100% targets before releasing onto the market in this day and age!

Also with the launch of the E72, Nokia have bundled together a number of their other services and put them under the Ovi umbrella (‘Ovi’ is Finnish for door).

So services such as their online applications store are now being rebranded as the Ovi Store, Ovi Music, Ovi Games, Ovi Maps etc. all these services can be accessed from your phone or PC at Ovi.com.

The extra’s that make this phone stand-out are its wide offering of applications including; Quickoffice Premier, Assisted GPS, its free map service (a turn-by-turn service is also offered at a cost), the torch (which is a personal favourite), one touch access to social networking sites and for those who like to chat, Nokia Chat. Nokia’s new instant messaging provides instant access to communities like Windows Live Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk and Ovi Chat. An oversight that sits neatly with these services is the omission of podcasting – not a deal breaker for me but once again why not include it if you are spreading your wings into multi-media capabilities?

The E72s convergence of functionality means that like most working people who have a life, we now expect our phone to seamlessly transition with us, from our phone as a full business device to our phone as a camera or a social networking tool or even a torch......the E72 oozes capability and if you ask me I would tell you that this new offer from Nokia is the bomb!