My 1st review with Nokia E52 and E55!

[Guest tsutton]

[teaser]

My 1st review with Nokia E52 and E55!

This is my first ever review of mobile phones so if I made any mistake/typos, I apologise in advance for this. This is also my first time of using Nokia mobile phone as I have always used Windows Mobile for a long time. So using Nokia phones will be a new experience for me.

Let’s get started...

Inside of each box, it came with the following:

• The phone
  
• BP-4L Battery
  
• Charger
  
• CA-101 Micro USB Data Cable
  
• HS-48 Stereo Headset
  
• CA-146C Charger Adapter
  
• Manual
  

Both are in the design form of Monoblock with the size of 116 x 49 x 9.9 mm with the E55 only 1 mm slimmer (116 x 48 x 9.9mm). While both of them come with the same body design, the keypads are different. E52 has the standard phone keypad while the other one, the E55, comes with the QWERTY keypad. They are running S60 operating system v3.2 (3rd Edition)

From the moment of pressing the power button, all I see is a blank screen until 10 seconds has passed, the ‘NOKIA’ logo loaded up, then after 5 seconds of the logo display, the infamous “joining hands” picture popped up and the music played.

Finally the last 5 seconds, it has gone straight to a working home screen. That was a total of 20 seconds from pressing the power button all the way to the home screen. The bit that I dislike is the 1st 10 seconds that are blank – it made me think it was not working.

Bu when I use the phone, it’s actually responsive to what I’m asking it to do. The layout of the home screen contains all of the items that I need to access easily. From the home screen, I can access Messaging, the Internet, turning on/off the WiFi, do a search, and use the camera and Maps/GPS.

Now, let’s get down and dirty with the phone specifications and the rest of my reviews.[/teaser]

Phones

As mentioned earlier, the phone designs are Monoblock with very similar size as each other. The E55 weights at 95g, carrying the QWERTY keypad while the E52 weights at 98g, using the standard keypad which are very light compared with other phones.

Both of them has the same display size at 320x240, carrying up to 16 million of colours which gives you the best possible colours. As these phones come with Accelerometer sensor, the display can rotate (when enabled manually) when you rotate the phone.

Memory

The E55 comes with 100MB of internal memory while the E52 comes with 60MB of internal memory, however the E55 does come with a massive 2GB microSD memory card prefitted with the E52 with 1GB microSD prefitted.

Messaging and Communication

The most important bit of the phones is the communications with the world. Both E52 and E55 come with the following:

MMS

Email

Chat

Video Calling

Push To Talk

Camera

E52 and E55 have 3.2 megapixel (2048x1536 pixels) cameras with 4 x digital zoom. They also come with flash for taking picture in a room with lack of lights. For video recording, they capture at 15fps which is a reasonable numbers.

Internet and Media

The E52 and E55 allow you to access the Internet and receive media contents. You are able to watch videos via many supported video formats, which are mp4, AVC/H.264, wmv, RV, Flash video and H.263/3GPP

You can also listen to music via their music player, supporting AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, MP3, AMR-NB and WMA.

This phone also comes with Realplayer Media Player and also FM Radio, which is very useful as you can listen to radio/music while “on the move” – all via the 3.5mm audio jack which is a bonus as it’s the most commonly used audio jack size.

Connectivity

Like most mobile phones, they come with the basic connectivity to get the best out of it. Both of them can do up to 8 hours (GSM) of talk time with up to 6 hours of talk time with WCDMA. They come with the following technologies to keep your phone connected to whatever you need to do:

Bluetooth

WLAN

GPRS

EDGE

WCDMA

HSDPA

Overall

As far as I can see, both phones has the same software installed, only that E55 comes with more applications like MSN, Maps, Games, and Ovi. I believe it’s down to the fact that E55 comes with bigger memory, however based on the same CPU - ARM 11 600 MHz processor.

I’ve found the onboard A-GPS working pretty well and have locked my location pretty quick. But the application that comes with it – Nokia Maps – does require for you to be connected to the Internet before it can work, so it’s best to avoid it unless you have unlimited Data connection to use it.

I asked about 6 of my friends to have a play with these phones and give me feedback on these phones. All but two liked the E52 due to the phone pad design. The other two was down to the colour of the phone and the QWERTY keypad.

My Thoughts

At the end of the day, I like the E52 more than E55 due to the keypad design as I am finding it difficult to use the QWERTY keypad on the E55 when trying to type with one hand. If the E55 came with the standard keypad, then I would have got this phone. So it’s the E52 for me.

However not all phones are perfect. I have issue with the SIM card holder – it’s easy to insert it, but is a bit difficult to remove it unless you have tiny fingers to pull it out. And the battery cover feels like it could snap off the edges when you open it incorrectly without sliding it out.

But apart from them, I feel that, as my first Nokia phones, they are pretty good to use, however I do have to admit that it does take a while for me to get used to it!

Our friends at Mobiles.co.uk [a] have both of them as 'Coming Soon' - be sure to register your interest with your choice of Nokia E52[a] or Nokia E55[a]

And that’s it, my first phone reviews – I hope I have covered what you need to know about these phones. If you have any questions, please feel free to ask me any questions - I have both of these phones on loan until 11th Sept 2009, so that's about 2 weeks for you to ask me any questions!

[Guest shadamehr]

What a brilliant first time review mate - for sure.

Just a couple of quick things though (and rest assured this in NO WAY detracts from a brilliant piece of info you have done, but merely from my many years as a Nokia Hard-core...).

So just to say two brief things for now...

1) The E55 is pseudo-QWERTY, not actual QWERTY as people might assume from the article - that is to say, it is like the hybrid Blackberry with what looks like a Qwerty kepypad, but actually has TWO letters per key (as opposed to a standard numeric keypad with three alpha letters per key), and it uses an enhanced form of T9/Prediction, to more accurately work out what word you meant, from the keys you press.

2) I get what you are saying about the "dead-period" when you first switch a Nokia phone on and nothing seems to happen. But for the benefit of those who might not have noticed or picked up on a feature, just to therefore let you know, that when you first switch on a more recent Nokia phone, as you hold the power button in for a couple of seconds, you SHOULD feel a slight vibration feedback. If you do, then rest assured, the phone is working, and is therefore starting to boot up. This element of responsive feedback was designed for this very reason. (Note, you will not get any form of vibra alert at all on a Nokia phone, IF it is presently connected to a charger however - another thing users might not have known).

Hope this helps, and well done for a great review. I'm off to read the "Ask me..." thread you have done too now mate.

[Guest tsutton]

1) Noted, thanks for pointing it out.

2) Yes, it did vibrate at the startup, should have mentioned that. But I still dislike the fact that it's blank for a good 10 seconds before it shows something. I'd be happy if it says "Booting", "Loading" or some pretty logo on it.

Thanks for your feedback. :)

[Guest chucky.egg]

Nice first-time review!

I've been using an E71 for nearly a year now, having moved from WM to S60.

The boot up can be a bit odd - especially as (on mine) the backlight doesn't come on until part way through, and it feels like they could skip those animations to boot faster.

For me the real winning points on the Nokia's are the fast startup, the responsive-ness, the excellent battery life, and the build quality.

[Guest DarkWanderer]

This is probably a dumb question but since the last Nokia I owned was the Matrix-style 7110 I have to ask. Is the synchronisation with Outlook (desktop not Exchange) any good? Back then there was just FoneSync which had a very clunky plugin for Outlook 2000. As HTC or anyone else seems unlikely or unwilling to make a WinMo phone with ordinary keys the E52 is looking very tempting.

[Guest shadamehr]

This is probably a dumb question but since the last Nokia I owned was the Matrix-style 7110 I have to ask. Is the synchronisation with Outlook (desktop not Exchange) any good? Back then there was just FoneSync which had a very clunky plugin for Outlook 2000. As HTC or anyone else seems unlikely or unwilling to make a WinMo phone with ordinary keys the E52 is looking very tempting.

Nokia PC Suite should manage the job for you nowadays.

In fact, as I have long long said, this is one of the areas where Windows LOSES out to Nokia.

Because despite Microsoft giving us BOTH the operating system, WinMo, AND the Application (Outlook 97/2000/XP/2007), you cannot actually CHOOSE which folders to sync with, on the Desktop App, using ActiveSync (or at least not when I last used WinMo).

But with Nokia PC Suite, you work your way through a Wizard Tool, specifying what you want to sync, which folders you want to include (so you can keep an Email Contacts Database and a Phone Contacts Database separate, should you wish to do so), and tell it which Calendar you want to use, and how far back and forward to sync etc.

If you want to configure the advanced stuff, like what device gets priority on a duplicate, you can then do this afterwards too.

And PC Suite should sync it all no problem for you.

Worth noting however, whilst you STILL, after all of these years, can not create a "Logical Repeating Calendar Entry" on a Nokia phone (that is for example, an entry that repeats, "the third Thursday of each month", or the "last Friday of the month" where it is a referenced point, not a fixed date such as "26th of each month"), you can however create these on your Desktop Calendar in Outlook, and then such entries get correctly sync'ed over to the phone anyway though.

For Calendar flexibility here though, I prefer to use Google Calendar, for an online Calendar for all my family. And then use a website called "GooSync" to do OVER THE AIR syncs with our phones, to keep everything in order.

GooSync is free for basic use of one single Calendar, but is chargeable, if you want it to keep multiple calendars and devices in Sync, like I do.