Blackberry can just bury its head in the sand with Nokia’s unabashed answer to a better corporate mobile phone in the same full QWERTY candybar form factor – the Nokia E72. Taking off from its commercially successful E71, the new handset looks a feels no different at first glance. But it packs a sensible upgrade underneath that can really give Blackberry a run of the corporate purchasing money.
But forget about Blackberry, the E72 is full-featured second generation smartphone aimed not just to corporate tykes, but to anyone wanting proven reliability and versatile functionality on a messaging handset that also offers a complete imaging and multimedia experience on the road.
Updated Features
The second generation E72 carries many of the features that distinguish it from its illustrious predecessor. Nokia must have instructed its engineers not to tamper much on a successful product, just update. It is the same quad band GSM850/900/1800 /1900 on 2G and a tri-band UMTS/HSDPA/HSUPA on 3G as its preceding E71.
They both sport an identical 2.36 inch TFT LCD screen that’s glass-covered with QVGA resolution and 16 million colors. You get the same Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR and A2DP, WiFi 802.11 b/g, microUSB 2.0, secondary video call camera and stereo FM receiver with RDS.
- On closer look, Nokia engineers did as instructed and retained the looks and feel of the E71 with just some cosmetic but substantial changes on its ergonomics, like a more tactile and larger keys on its QWERTY pad that has more affinity with the cheaper E63. The narrower space bar could be problematic for some users as it takes some getting used to when a wide space bar is the norm.
- If you can do a comparative between the two, the new E72 is much faster in all the features they shares. Nokia nearly doubled the clock speed of the ARM 11 CPU both handsets use, from 369 MHz on the E71 to 600 MHz on the E72 with an effective 30% increase in execution and response times as application launches and transitions are nearly instant and a lot smoother.
- The Nokia E72 gets an updated OS with the 3rd edition Symbian using Feature Pack 2 whereas the older one uses FP1. This may account for its speedier response as well as better power management. While using the same BP-4L lithium-polymer battery, the E72 gets a better 12 hours of talk time and 4280 hours of standby time on the 2G network.
- You get 5 megapixels of LED flash camera with manual focus from its optical joystick – not exactly instant when you want a quick shot of a fleeting moment, but it works. You also get geo-tagging and VGA recording at 15 fps.
Internal memory is slightly increased to 250MB from the previous 128 MB, still a tad inadequate for anything but the simplest of phone use, but you still get microSD expansion support for up to 16 GB with some reports saying it can recognize 32 GB. It even comes with a free 4 GB in its package.
Nokia E72 Links:
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