BenQ E72 budget Windows Mobile smartphone
A business-savvy handset with mass-market appeal?
Review The BenQ E72 has touched down in the UK initially as an exclusive device on the BT Fusion mobile/Wi-Fi dual-mode phone service, though you can find it SIM-free - and quite cheaply too.
It’s a Windows Mobile 6 Standard-powered smartphone, using a non-touchscreen interface and a conventional candybar-style design.
Although the E72 supports Wi-Fi, it doesn’t offer high-speed cellular connectivity – there’s no 3G when you’re out of WLAN range. Instead, the E72 relies on quad-band GSM/GPRS/Edge for mobile data connections.
BenQ's E72: mass-market styling
Despite the presence of Windows Mobile, the E72's form and styling suggest a regular mass-market phone rather than a business-minded device. Its compact bodywork measures 108 x 46.3 x 13.8mm, it has a mirrored screen and metallic, coloured trim on a graphite body in Nokia 5310 XpressMusic style. It tips the scales at a pleasantly pocketable 90g, and while its casing feels a little on the plastic side, it’s solid enough.
Touchscreen or not, the display is feels a bit undersized for a smartphone. The 240 x 320 (QVGA), 65,000-colour TFT screen is an average two-incher, which can make some text appear cramped when eye-balling websites. We’d have preferred a bigger display to enhance the messaging experience too.
On the controls side, BenQ does a good job, offering a large, well-spaced numberpad with buttons that are slightly sloped to help fingers differentiate between rows. The central navpad is large and responsive too, while conventional soft-menu keys and call/end buttons are supplemented with a Windows Mobile Home key and back button.
BenQ has adapted the regular Windows Mobile home screen to present plenty of shortcut icons representing features and applications. A row of large app icons towards the top of the screen can be tabbed through and selected, or you can scroll down to select further options.
COMMENTS
crippled win mobile
I'm not sure there's much point in using a Windows Mobile based phone if it doesn't have Office Mobile apps. This sort of phone, price-point and form factor would probably have been best suited to something a lot snappier like a Symbian Series 40 OS, cf. Nokia 6300.
Bit of a miss there!
Bill
The software was designed by Microsoft, a company owned by Bill. There's no other reason.
There was a movie made about killing Bill. In fact, there were 2 movies made about killing Bill.
Task manager
Don't know about standard, but in their touchscreen version you can install third party (often free, and very tiny in RAM usage) that closes the applications when the 'X' is pressed.
@Wonder
They make you use task manager as it's designed badly. It should have a nice easy to select way of closing down an application. Not scrolling through a ton of menus to find an application.
Wonder
I always wondered why windows mobile makes you use the task manager to close anything.
Does anyone know?
