Nokia E72 is a Symbian smartphone, featuring full keyboard, GPRS navigation, optical Navi key, 5.0 MegaPixel main camera with flash, 0.3 MegaPixel secondary camera, 16.7 millions color display and big battery.
Except the exterior improvements, it has many not visible from first sight new features, making it one of the best Nokia business phones available on the market today. Announced in June, 2009, the phone was available for purchase
in late year 2009. It still keeps relatively high price. As at May, 2010, in the shops Nokia E72 is in the price range between 550 BGN and 700 BGN for the phone, without contract with mobile phone operator.
For all the extras the phone can offer, it is worth the price.
Package
The phone comes in white box with dimensions 14.4 x 19.4 x 7.4 cm. On the top of the box is picture of the phone, along with NOKIA Eseries text and the name - Nokia E72 on the bottom.
The right side of the box is in red, featuring only NOKIA Eseries text in black font.
On the left side, along with the Nokia E72 text is outlined with red sticker one main selling point - Local maps, device lifetime global walk navigation and 10 days drive navigation included.
Other main selling points of the phone are written on the bottom of the package, like in other Nokia model boxes:
Designed for the way we work -Best in class messaging -Optical Navi key for easy navigation -High quality voice calls -5MP camera with single touch auto focus. Right to the text are three pictures of the phone in face, sideways and back, but these
pictures does not give much information about the real size and proportions of the phone. Next is the same text in six different languages, then logos of other main features of the phone are printed.
They are from left to right - 3G, WLAN, HSDPA HSUPA, VoIP, email, web, camera, A-GPS, security, speakerphone, two modes.
There are also logos of Bluetooth, Real player, S60 and Java.
Inside the package are the phone itself, power charger, headphones set along with six white rubber rings, USB cable, MicroSD card adapter, wrist strap, pouch, two black clips, two black cleaning clothes, 90-pages manual in one language, best practices manual in two languages and twelve pages leaflet in six languages for the free lifetime navigation for walk. The size of the phone is 11.4 x 5.8 x 1 cm.
Difference with the package contents of another Nokia Eseries phone I had touch with - Nokia E51 is the bigger charger. I prefer the smaller and more elegant Nokia chargers. For the people who travel, the bigger charger is compensated in the Nokia E72 with the ability to charge the phone via USB cable from computer, one of the features I love in the Toshibo V9+i mobile phone.
The lack of installation CD which I noticed is compensated with the availability of the software in the phone itself, accessible when connected as mass storage to a computer. New accessory for a phone I had touch with is the wrist strap, a mandatory element for digital cameras. The wrist strap hangs the phone at the bottom left side, making it perfect for tourists who want to take pictures occasionally, but does not have big enough pockets for digital camera and phone.
Installation
Just like the other business class phones produced by Nokia, the installation is very easy. To open the back cover, press the button on the bottom part and lever the stainless steel plate.
Removing the cover reveals the big battery of the phone. It is one of the biggest Li-Ion batteries around, almost leaving no space for the SIM card and the camera. The SIM card has a special holder placed above the battery. To place a new SIM card,
the battery must be removed and the card nest must be pulled down. After placing the card with the connectors down oriented as shown on the diagram on the phone board, return the nest to its initial position with push up, return the battery and put the cover back by placing it until it ticks from up to down.
Attaching the wrist strip is trickier, but after some trial and error training it can be done in less than a minute. Placement of memory card does not require removal of the back cover. On the left side of the phone on the top there are two separate rubber covers - one for the USB jack connector at the upper part, and one for the memory card under the USB cover.
Both can be opened separately with ease, without the need of long nail or screwdriver. Putting or removing the memory card however was a hard experience with short cut nails like mine, requiring extra effort and extra care in order to avoid accident and bad experience with the small and easy to break MicroSD card. Removal and insertion of memory card can be done in working phone as well. If the phone is working, it is suggested first to press the power button and select the Remove memory card option in order
to avoid damage of the memory card and its contents. All the procedures for the installation are written very well in the professional created manual.
To start the phone, press the power button situated at the upper side of the phone for around three seconds. The startup of the phone is announced with a short vibration. After some seconds of internal checks, the Nokia shaking hands animation with music appears, telling the user that everything is working properly. Then the date and time selection screens appear. The date starts from October 9th, 2009, suggesting the first sales dates of the device.
Usage
Usage of the phone is very easy. The big screen and the full keyboard really help a lot. To call a person from the contact list, press the first letter of his or her name or family and select the name from the appearing list. Pressing more letters from the name with narrow down the available names, if the phone book is occupied with many similar names. The contacts manager gives many possibilities to copy, duplicate, remove, group, print and backup the names and the other information associated with the persons.
On the big keyboard there are fast buttons for the main menu, the calendar, contacts, messaging, Bluetooth, Silent profile, browser and even the usage of the camera flash as a flashlight - very handy feature at dark places. Usage of the phone for talk is very easy. The loudspeaker is situated at the back of the phone left to the camera flash. The produced sound from the loudspeaker sometimes is not loud enough to be heard at very noisy places in the city. For listening music it can not produce loud sound as well.
Definitely the Toshibo V9+i offers advantage in the usage at noisy places or just for listening to music during hiking. For hiking there is compass to help the people navigating through the paths. The walking navigation is free for the device, available for more than sixty countries. The driving navigation have more limited license. The 320 x 240 pixel wide screen helps a lot with the orientation on the maps. Another highly developed part of the phone is the messaging suite, together with the e-mail possibilities to share information with exchange servers, chat and social networking.
The powerful Calendar is another fine piece of software which shall not be omitted. Going to the browser is also possible with fast key, allowing the phone to be used for many tasks at once. The operation and switch between various applications is smooth, without noticeable slowdown. Usage of the advertised optical Navi key is easy to get used to, but I prefer the classic way with press, where I do not have pain in the finger after continuous usage. Also pressing the key than sliding over it is more precise pointing. There are two profiles in the phone which can be switched anytime -
Business and Personal. The two different profiles can have totally different
configurations and settings, so your personal life does not affect the business and the other way around. A phone for business and fun doing the job pretty well.
Applications
The phone in Grid menu view shows 4 X 3 icons on single screen unlike on the other Nokia phones, including the Nokia N-Gage, which show only 3 X 3 icons at once.
The Applications submenu is accessible from the the bottom right icon on the main menu screen. There are eight icons coming as standard. If the mobile phone operator have a menu in the SIM-card, it is
ninth icon on the lower left corner. All the extra applications installed are appearing as icons after the mobile phone operator icon. Built-in the phone are the Clock with the possibility to set alarms,
Games - for gaming and fun, Home media - with the possibility to share content over networks, GPS - with Maps, GPS data and Landmarks.
On the second row of the applications menu are the Voice functions icon for recording of voice commands, Search - to search the Internet or the phone contents, World Traveler for Weather data, World clock, Currencies exchange rates, Travel plan and Worldmap.
The phone can be used like walkie-talkie with selection of the Push to talk (PTT) icon. If an application is already running the background, its icon have a green circle at the upper right corner.
Browsing the Internet with the phone is smooth and trouble free. There is Pop-Up blocker and possibility to disable Java/ECMA script for even more secure surfing.
The built-in phone browser spoofs as Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.3; Series60/3.2 NokiaE72-1/022.007; Profile/MIDP-2.1 Configuration/CLDC-1.1 ) AppleWebKit/525 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 BrowserNG/7.1.19974,
rendering correctly the pages I have tested. Youtube videos are working perfect, with both player versions available, but the videos on hirudov.com were not shown with the text that I am trying to install Adobe Flash Player on an unsupported operating system. I hope Adobe in the future will open their proprietary formats for more Operating Systems.
Office software
The Office icon is above the Applications on the main menu. It invokes another menu with thirteen icons - File manager, Dictionary, Intranet, Quickoffice, Converter, Font Magnifier, Calculator, Notes,
PsilocWirelessPresenter, Multiscanner, Zip manager, Adobe Reader and Active notes.
Using File manager, all the operations related to files are done quick and easy, including move, copy and setting of passwords.
The Dictionary is installed with English, but other languages packs are easy to download through Wireless connection over the Internet from the Nokia web site. Using Intranet icon is for connecting to Local Area Network (LAN). The Quickoffice applications allow creation and processing of
Document (Word compatible files), Workbook (Excel compatible files) and Presentation (PowerPoint files). With the Converter calculations for Currency, Area, Energy, Length, Mass, Power, Pressure, Temperature, Time, Velocity and Volume are as easy as entering their amount and looking for corresponding amount in the converted unit.
With the Font Magnifier the phone fonts can be magnified to up to 140% or shrank to 50% of their original size. Changing the font size requires reboot of the phone. The Calculator is very simple, keeping in mind that there is spreadsheet software for serious calculations. The Notes are for writing down memos, but there is also Active notes for more important memos.
Another great application is the WiPresenter (Psiloc Wireless Presenter): the perfect tool to manage your PowerPoint presentations and to show the phone screen on the PC in real time. Nice application for people doing lots of presentations, able to count the duration time of the speech.
What I found amazing in the phone is the Multiscanner application, which uses the phone camera to capture and recognize text. It has Card Reader for business cards, entering them directly into the contact lists and Text Scanner for text files.
The tests I made, recognized English text very good even the different fonts on singe pages. For Cyrillic text, the results were not that good. Capturing the text from different angles and distance also affects the quality of the recognized text.
With the Zip utility, all the created text files and other documents can be compressed in a single file for easier management and transfer to other devices. The Adobe Reader LE application for reading documents in Adobe formats is presented with version 1.5.0.
Other utilities
The phone have enormous amount of software applications bundled as standard. There are many more available through the Ovi Store and on the Internet. Being a Symbian S60 smartphone means that thousand of applications are already compatible with the device.
Also available is the application Garmin Mobile XT, using the navigation capapbilities,
but it is not budled for free with the phone.
The Radio application allows store of fifty radio stations. In the Music player all the songs can be organized by Artists, Albums, Playlists, Genres and Composers. There is also All songs list.
Additional music ca be purchased and downloaded with the use of the Music store. Media can be sent to other people with Share online. With the Video center movies can be download and seen via Video feeds.
Cameras
The Nokia E72 mobile phone have primary 5.0 MegaPixel camera shooting images at resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels. In ambient daylight the shoot images are with very good quality. For darker scenes, the flash does pretty good job for close objects. The camera can be used for shooting videos as well, at the VGA resolution of 640 x 480 pixels in video/mp4v-es format, easily played on any player, including the MPlayer on Amiga.
The flash light can be used for video light as well for shooting videos in better light conditions. Unfortunately, when connecting the USB cable to the phone there is no option to use any of the cameras as web camera. Another useful option is the panorama mode for shooting scenes in 180 degrees. All the shot images during my tests were in impressive for phone quality with preserved color saturation and many details.
Using the secondary camera, situated at the front of the phone for shooting pictures is not recommended. The images are shot in resolution of 640 x 480 (VGA), the colors are okay, but the picture have distortions and low detail on the periphery. Even the Nokia 2330 Classic camera can produce better images. The secondary camera is for use in video calls, where it shall do its job fine
for pictures needing fast transfer over the network.
After the images are shot there is feature rich image processing software for fast edit of the produced pictures. Finished images can be printed with preset printer or other device immediately by To printer or kiosk option. Color tone can be set to do image processing for videos in real time. Remaining space for images or video is shown on the top right of the screen for better management. The images shooting can be set to
lower quality in order to have more pictures if the space is limited. I prefer to shoot the images in best possible quality and then reduce their resolution and quality, if needed.
Games
Being a Symbian phone, means the Nokia E72 already have big library of game software titles possible to be played on the nice big screen. The Navi key is easy to press and the full featured keyboard makes the gaming experience even more fun.
Given for free, built-in the phone are two games. The games menu is the second icon in the Applications screen.
Block Cascade Fusion
Block Cascade Fusion is yet another Tetris clone, implemented very well. The game is developed by GAMELION. The phone had installed Version V 1.0.5 of the game.
First impression of the game the nice drawn title picture. Next is the game music, which makes me turn the volume up. The OPTIONS of the main menu allow change of the volume, also possible by pressing the volume buttons on the right side of the phone, switch of the vibration, reset of the saved scores and change of the language.
For this game, language is not important, but for reading the HELP it is useful. Just like in Tetris, the aim of the game is to gain as much score as possible, before the blocks fill up the screen to the top. The falling figures are controlled with the Navi key. The figures can be rotated clockwise by pressing the OK button.
The game is played on a 13 x 17 grid. The difference between the classic Russian game and Block Cascade Fusion is in the creating glowing blocks which does not disappear immediately. Five or more blocks of the same color have to be matched in a vertical or horizontal line. All the glowing blocks gets destroyed during the fusion, happening after certain period of time,
written on the left of the screen, under the next falling figure picture. Removing more blocks during a fusion gives more points, but the different figures tend to move at different speed. Also if a figure is next to the wall, it will fall slowly with vibration of the phone, simulating collision. The complications of the game, along with the different falling speed and the
time between fusions may force the players aiming for higher results to develop a strategy of creating removable lines shortly after the fusion as fast as possible before the next fusion. Shadows of the figures heading position help the player to make the decisions faster. When the figures fall from high, they shake the screen. Nice simulated physics in the game, implemented together
with smooth animation, colorful graphics and addictive gameplay are making me play it over and over again.
The two games included in the phone are professionally presented and well made.
A Tetris clone and solitaire card puzzles are probably perfect games for business oriented persons, but for me, the game offerings of the Nokia 1208 and Vodafone 225 are better chosen for people who want to play and have fun.
Conclusion
I found the Nokia E72 very easy to use. Today, most of the people buy mobile phone not only for talking, messaging and communicating. Today the mobile phone is also used as multimedia device, navigator, organizer, digital camera for photos and video, recording facility, e-mail and documents reader, connector to social networks, Internet browser, calculator and spreadsheet, gaming console, notes collector, mass storage device and data transfer.
Nokia E72 does all this jobs and even more. Thanks to the fast processor and big memory, the phone does all the requested tasks very well. If there is doubt about some feature, there is very extensive help, to guide anyone during usage. For me it is worth the price. One of the many pluses is the extra big battery, lasting for long hours, making the phone ideal for long journeys, business, fun and more.