Hands on with Nokia's E7
Communicator heir gets aired
Video At Nokia World the E7 was described as being built on the Communicator 9000 heritage. You can judge for yourself in this demonstration that shows off the user interface and e-mail features of this Symbian^3 smartphone. The E7's HDMI output even drives a monitor and there's the USB On The Go storage accessory, which enables easy data copying from external drives. You can read about our hands-on impressions of the Nokia E7, C7 and C6 Symbian^3 phones here. ®
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COMMENTS
Too little too late
As a previous owner of a 9110 and 9210 I think this just looks dated and way behind everything out there now. The GUI animations looked slow and unhelpful.
I got my 9210 in 2002 and this shows very little development for 8 years.
White text on a black background looks poor and unclear from a HCI perspective. How can you tell what is clickable and what isn't?
Email client looked dull, messaging app looked dull.
First impressions
Despite the size of the screen, it still doesn't tell you the date and time that emails arrive. You have to go to the email and click details?
The task switcher didn't seem that easy to use. It seems that you have to slide your ringer back and forward several times before the task switcher actually moves? Is that because of the task switcher app, or is that because of the touch screen?
Compared to what has been on the market for a few years, it is late and still behind.
Um
All the e-mails/messages I've seen in the demo have the time on the right.
The task switcher seems to differentiate between pressing/holding and dragging (notice the spinner animation on the press). It looks like the guy pressed it and carried on talking before dragging so maybe that's why it looks a bit clunky. Menu scrolling doesn't seem to have this problem.
It's not perfect, this release of Symbian was just to catch up, but I've certainly seen worse.
4" screen
The Nokia's screen has a widescreen aspect (16:9), so the diagonal dimension will be longer than for a 4:3 screen of the same area (as found in iPhone, and Samsung handsets). Placed side-by-side, it's pretty much the same size as the others.
Nice...
Want one. Damn my recent upgrade!
I would be a little cautious about the 4" screen though - isn't that a bit big for a phone?
Any idea if Nokia will be releasing a N series with a keyboard?
