The Nokia E5 Review: A Cheaper E72
by Mithun Chandrasekhar on November 30, 2010 2:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Nokia
- E5
- Mobile
Performance, Battery Life and Call Quality
As I mentioned earlier in the review, the E5 is quite a usable phone, as long as you remain within the confines of the Symbian OS. I have included Opera Mobile 10 numbers on the E5 for reference.
During the page load testing, I noticed an interesting behavior; the E5 would just stop loading a page that’s more than 1-1.5MB after a couple of seconds when over WiFi. Because of this, Engadget.com was stuck at about 1.3MB for more than 3 minutes before I decided to call it quits. I noticed the same behavior while running the Anandtech battery test suite over WiFi where the phone would just refuse to load pages after iterating two times through our battery life test suite. The only way around it was to either stop and reload the page or close and reopen the browser, but neither of these worked long enough to actually complete our tests.
Battery Life
The BL-4D 1200 mAh battery powering the E5 is a step down from the 1500 mAh one found in the E72 (although it is the same found on Nokia’s current flagship, the N8). This means the talk time is going to take a hit compared to the E72, but the E5 manages to post some pretty respectable numbers. Also, the official numbers indicate that the standby time for the E5 is an incredible 25+ days while non-3G talk time is north of 15 hours. Under normal usage which included some voice calls, push-email turned on, some surfing and texting, I could get away with not charging the phone for almost 3 days.
For these tests, we ran our standard page loading suite which loads through a few dozen pages endlessly until the battery dies. Screen brightness is set to 50% and all extraneous processes are killed. The WiFi test is again missing because the E5 mysteriously refused to load our test suite after a few iterations in either the default browser or Opera.
The 1200 mAh battery in the E5
Call quality on the E5 was good overall. The sound was crisp and clear and the quality remains good even at lower signal strengths. The E5 seems to hold on to signals noticeably better than my Palm Pre Plus on AT&T in the Bay Area. Of note is the fact that the E5 kept alternating between 3G and 3.5G (HSDPA) once in a while even when kept at the same location. Average 3G speed measured a surprisingly low 725 kbps.
The speakerphone on the E5 is actually very clear and usable. It’s adequately loud to have a conversation in a normal environment with some background noise. It also holds on well at high volume without any distortions and the voice sounds quite natural albeit flat. The same goes for the ringtones which actually sound really good. Coupled with some effects Nokia dubs as “3D Ringtones”, the speaker is well upto its task. Also, being a Quad-Band GSM/UTMS device, you can expect to use the E5 in most parts of the world.
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velis - Tuesday, November 30, 2010 - link
Heh, it's ridiculous how we all expect to see reviews of super new fancy-shpancy gadgets.While this article just shouts "OLD!!!" to the OS used in this phone, I still have to say this:
[bold]This OS does the job[/bold] unlike certain other OS(s) where a simple reminder is a useless feature because it only reminds if you're sitting on the phone at the time, where you are only notified of a call when it stops "ringing" (not that it rang in the first place), etc.
While the newest gadgets may look cool, feature some super impressive HW and SW, they really tend to forget a phone's basic functions.
That said, it's a shame this phone has such a pathetic screen.
Drunken.Swagger - Tuesday, November 30, 2010 - link
"The one other idiosyncratic move on Nokia's part was to not allow entering contacts by name in the texting application. In this day and age, having to remember and enter a contact's number instead of just typing their name with the phone suggesting contacts as you type is laughable. There is a way to “Add Recipient(s)” via the menu, but this is a smartphone, and it’s not the year 2000. Come on guys, get it together."I have a Nokia E71 and it does allow this feature. Given that it's similar software, I think you might need to investigate further to make sure it's not available (Because it is rather picky).
mythun.chandra - Tuesday, November 30, 2010 - link
You are correct Druken.Swagger. As pointed out by Akdor 1154 later on, clicking on the center button in the "To" field shows the contact list. Why they didn't make it "type ahead" capable, I don't know. :)deeyo - Tuesday, November 30, 2010 - link
I have an E71 too. You can start typing in a name, and once you press the middle button it will list all the matches in your contacts list.If I type 'Jess' and click enter, it'll list "Jesse B, Jessica G...." for example
In general there's a lot of clever little functions tucked away in the default OS, although the app store selection is AWFUL! And nobody makes new programs =(
ojisama - Wednesday, December 8, 2010 - link
S40 phones also open contact list with the center button. Also, you can write your message first and if the recepient field is empty the concact list is opened (with favourites on top, if added.). I don't think I've ever seen a Nokia phone that forces you to remember the number...Type ahead can be a bit problematic, if your recipient uses several numbers. Perhaps not a bad idea, but since I'm usually sending text messages to a limited number of people, selecting the name from recently used list is faster.
Calin - Tuesday, November 30, 2010 - link
The Symbian operating system has at least a couple newer versions: the S60 3rd Edition (feature pack 2) is still sold, but the Symbian S60 5th Edition is newer, and the open source Symbians (^1, ^2 and ^3) are newer still.mino - Tuesday, November 30, 2010 - link
Yeah, Actually Symbian is about as "old" as Windows is.The only problem with it (on smartphones) is they (for political reasons) chose S60 instead of perfecting UIQ which was WAY ahead of its time when it came smartphone UI's ... :(
Belard - Tuesday, November 30, 2010 - link
This phone does look great... but its screen, camera and OS are vastly out-dated, and so what its its targeted towards "BUSINESS USERS". When an Android, WM7 and iPhones offer far more for the same price - why would they be caught using something that is frustrating to use?There are some Android & WM7 phones that have slide-out keyboards... check.
I did play the video you made with this phone... its HORRIBLE. I recorded a 720-HD quality video on my Samsung Galaxy-S phone, it LOOKS great, sounds very good... with its high-res AMOLED screen, it looks almost as good as real-life.
At&t (and I gather others), sell the Galaxy-S for $100~150 with a contract.
Internet ability rocks and that is important for business. (GPS on Samsung still sucks)
I remember when I last had a NOKIA phone, and I never looked back. Using SONY for years until I went to Android.
The top 3 phone WILL be Android, WM7 and iPhone... RIM is still behind, MS has done good research (wow). Where is NOKIA?
thewhat - Tuesday, November 30, 2010 - link
"When an Android, WM7 and iPhones offer far more for the same price"Same price? I don't think so. Well, maybe _some_ Android phones can be had for that money, but that's it. The iPhone is 2x-3x the price of this Nokia.*
I'm not a fan of Symbian or Nokia, but let's be real, it will still sell because it's relatively cheap. (Still too expensive IMO and I'd probably rather get an Android or wait for Meego phones.)
*if you're talking about the price on contract with the US carriers, that's a different story. The price of US smartphones on contract are all pretty much the same, +- $50, because you're required to get the same expensive "smartphone plan", no matter which phone you choose. But that's a specific market which doesn't reflect most of the world's prices or the off contract prices.
T2k - Tuesday, November 30, 2010 - link
"The top 3 phone WILL be Android, WM7 and iPhone..."WOW, powerful stupid.
It'd surprising to see WM7 to reach even RIM sales...