Nokia E5 (2)

Introduction

Email used to be a part of the corporate world and now it’s increasingly becoming an essential means of communication for the lot of us – not just the white-collar kind. So if you can’t fight it, the best thing to do is get yourself properly equipped – and the Nokia E5 is the right tool for the job. It’s no old timer either, it knows how to deal with those newfangled social networks as well.

The E5 has skill to match the E72 down to the last spec. OK, almost. Some features have sure taken a hit (what’s with the fixed-focus 5MP camera), but that’s something most people can live with considering the lower price of the E5.

Nokia E5 official photos

We found the Nokia C3 to be an excellent no-frills messenger. The Nokia E5 brings Symbian aboard, which accounts for many of its advantages – multitasking, Office document viewing and editing, free voice-guided navigation – you know the drill.

Anyway, here’s what the Nokia E5 has going for and against it, in short.
Key features
QWERTY messenger bar
Quad-band GSM/EDGE
Tri-band 3G with 10.2Mbps HSDPA and 2Mbps HSUPA
Symbian S60 UI, 3rd edition FP2
600MHz processor, 256MB RAM; 250MB user-accessible storage
2.36″ 256K-color QVGA display
5 megapixel fixed-focus camera, LED flash
VGA video recording at 15fps
Wi-Fi b/g; DLNA and UPnP support
GPS receiver; Ovi Maps 3.0 with free life-time voice guided navigation
Stereo FM radio with RDS, Internet radio
Bluetooth (with A2DP)
Standard microUSB port (charging)
microSD card slot (32GB supported, 2GB included)
3.5mm audio jack
Good email and social networking support
Office document editor; PDF viewer; ZIP file support
Good audio quality
Reasonable price
Microsoft Office Messenger support
Quick Business and Personal homescreen toggle
Main disadvantages
Non-hot-swappable microSD card under the battery
Camera doesn’t have autofocus
Poor video recording
Low-res screen isn’t very good for browsing
No native Twitter and MySpace clients

The Nokia E5 is probably targeted at young people stuck in a corporate environment. Or maybe it’s caught in the trend of more and more companies betting on social networking to boost sales. Whatever the reason, the Nokia E5 has pretty extensive support for social networks and IM chatting to go along with strictly-business offerings like the Microsoft Office messenger.

Nokia E5 live shots

No matter how good touchscreen input has gotten these last few years, a good old physical QWERTY is still the real deal. Which is why QWERTY messenger bars like the E5 can survive in a world dominated by touch phones.

The high price associated with touch phones (at least the ones with a big enough screen to even consider heavy texting) makes the affordable Nokia E5 a sensible alternative – especially for users who think touchscreen doesn’t make sense in business.

On the next page we’ll take a look just how much you’re getting for the price. Make the jump to see what’s inside the box and a look into the hardware of the E5.

Nokia E5 unboxed

The Nokia E5 box is nothing out of the ordinary. You get all the basics you need – a charger (not the most compact of kinds), a short microUSB cable, a one-piece headset plus some manuals.

The Nokia E5 retail package

The modest set of accessories helps keep the price down. You do get a 2GB microSD card though – enough to get you started, but the E5 can take cards of up to 32GB.
Nokia E5 360-degree spin

The Nokia E5 is on the compact side of QWERTY messengers at 115 x 58.9 x 12.8 mm. The 2.36” landscape display, large controls (soft keys, call keys, etc.), and a spacious four-row QWERTY cover most of the phone’s front.

The Nokia E5 weighs in at 126 grams – it’s by no means too heavy – it’s more like “solid” than anything else.

The Nokia E5 fails to match the slim and sharp E71 but the width is just right to make it comfortable for both single and two-handed use. It’s a no-frills phone that doesn’t look or feel cheap.
Design and construction

The Nokia E5 is not an attention-grabber, but it doesn’t look out of place at work or at home either. The mature, no-nonsense looks can be traced back to the Nokia E63, which served as the prototype for the C3 too.

The Nokia E5 doesn’t look cheap

You should be careful comparing the E5 with top-tier messengers like E71 and E72. They’re obviously in different leagues. What’s important however is that the keyboard and the screen are just as good. The E5 is thicker and doesn’t use as much metal but still offers the solid quality feel that any business phone should.

A messenger of steel and a messenger on budget

The Nokia E5 is quite conservative in its choice of paintjobs. The phone is available in Carbon Black, Silver Grey and Chalk White. The Sky Blue and Copper Brown versions add a bit of color to the mix but nothing too flashy that could turn the business crowd away.

The front of the Nokia E5 is all matt plastic that won’t embarrass you by getting all smudgy and greasy. The back is plastic too, except for the battery cover, which is made of metal.

The landscape 2.36″ 256K-color display of 320 x 240 pixel resolution takes half of the phone’s face. The QVGA resolution is the norm even for the high-ranking Eseries messengers but the image quality is surprisingly good. Better yet, sunlight legibility won’t let you down either.

The 2.36” display is fine

Underneath the screen is a spacious navigation deck built around a reasonably tactile D-pad. There are three buttons on either side of the D-pad. Call and End knobs are at the bottom, the two soft keys on top. In between are the Home and Messaging keys.

The soft keys and the D-pad are user-configurable (depending on the homescreen mode). All controls are decently sized and quite comfortable to use.

The earpiece and light sensor above the screen • A spacious navigation pad under the display

Speaking of buttons, it’s time to take a closer look at the full QWERTY keyboard. The keys are slightly bigger than the ones on the Nokia E71 keyboard, though they’re not quite as prominent and have a rather short stroke. Still, as far as overall typing is concerned, the E5 is a serious rival of the excellent E71.

One thing the E5 has over the E71 is the torch feature. Pressing and holding the space bar in standby powers up the LED flash on the back so you can use your handset a flashlight. That’s a nice little perk and it even overrides the keyboard lock.

The full QWERTY keyboard promises hassle-free typing

The sides of the Nokia E5 are mostly bereft of controls. The right side features the volume rocker at the top. The left side is bare.

Not much to see on either side of the Nokia E5

On either side are two latches that release the battery cover. At first you might confuse the latch on the right for a shutter key but it isn’t.

Battery cover release knobs

The top takes care of all the wired connectivity on the Nokia E5. There’s a 2mm charger plug, a 3.5mm audio jack and the microUSB port, which is hidden under a plastic flap. You can use both the charger plug and the microUSB port for charging the phone.

Charger plug and 3.5mm audio jack on the top • The bare bottom

Rearside are the massive hole of the 5-megapixel camera lens, the LED flash and the loudspeaker grill. The impressively looking lens aside, the fixed-focus cam turned out a bit of a disappointment but we’ll get to it later on.

5-megapixel camera lacks autofocus

Under the metal cover is the 1200 mAh Li-Ion BL-4D battery, which powers the Nokia E5. The battery is quoted at to 635 hours of stand-by or up to 12 hours of talk-time.

The 1200 mAh Li-Ion battery has less capacity than the one in the C3

The Nokia E5 is a neat and tidy QWERTY messenger bar. It’s not in the same league as the E72, not even the ageing E71, but has enough personality and skill. The build quality is excellent and the keyboard is top notch. Ergonomics and pocketability earn good marks too. What more can you want from a business messenger? Good software, which we’ll look at in the next section.

The Nokia E5 held in hand

Symbian is pleased to serve

The Nokia E5 is powered by Symbian 9.3 and runs on the S60 3rd edition user interface with Feature Pack 2.

The E5 uses the so-called Active Standby homescreen. It is available in several different flavors so you can prioritize the set of shortcuts you need on the screen.

Basic standby mode • Vertical icon bar • Horizontal icon bar • Active standby

The Basic layout just shows you the wallpaper (and the usual status indicators of course) and you can assign shortcuts to the D-pad directions. The Vertical icon bar layout has four tabs – shortcuts, calendar, music player and personalization and it doesn’t hide much of the wallpaper.

The other three layouts are more elaborate. They offer several rows of “homescreen applications” (e.g. upcoming events from the calendar, received emails and so on) along with shortcuts.

The Horizontal icon bar is the most basic of the three. You get a row of six customizable shortcuts at the top of the screen, below are email, calendar, Ovi Chat and WLAN notifications (they also act as shortcuts to their respective apps).

When the music player (or the radio) is on, a new row is displayed with the track info.

The Active layout is the good old Active Standby that was on the Nokia E71/E72 and others. It looks like the Horizontal layout, but tucks in an analog clock on the left of the screen and lets you customize what rows to appear under the shortcut toolbar.

There are 15 different options to choose from (e.g. missed calls, voice mail, to-dos and so on). You could turn them all on, but only five are visible at any time and you can’t scroll up and down to see the rest.

Typical E-series, there the Business and Personal modes for this layout. They allow you to quickly switch between two sets of shortcuts and homescreen apps – one with business apps at hand, the other, say, with Twitter and Facebook shortcuts.

The Contacts bar • viewing a contact from the Contacts bar

The other option is the Contact bar layout, which has been available on Nokia handsets for quite a while too. It puts a row of favorite contacts on top three homescreen applications – Calendar, WLAN wizard, Ovi Contacts – along with the usual six customizable shortcuts (this time at the bottom).

The Favorite contacts are placed on top, each represented by the contact photo and their first name. Four contacts are visible at a time and you can scroll left and right for the rest. The music player traditionally has a tab for the homescreen – but because the space is limited, it usually ends up replacing the Calendar tab.

There’s one final layout – the Talking theme. It enhances accessibility by reading out loud the option you’ve selected.

As with all Symbian phones, there is a built-in voice recognition system. It does a good job, being fully speaker-independent.

The Symbian task manager appears on every pop-up menu. It’s actually placed on top of every list, which can be a little irritating at times, considering you can still invoke it with the well-known shortcut of pressing and holding the Menu key (the one with the House pictogram).

The Nokia E5 is a good multitasker

The Nokia E5 is powered by a 600MHz CPU with 256MB RAM, which is plenty for a Symbian smartphone. The UI is speedy and the battery lasts quite a while between charges, the only lags we noticed concern some transition effects when going through the menus.

A good phonebook

Symbian handsets have an excellent phonebook. There is storage space for a practically unlimited number of contacts and fields with all the available memory potentially usable for the purpose. Contacts can be freely ordered by first or last name and can naturally be searched by gradual typing of any of the names.

Contact list • searching • viewing contact details • linking to the Facebook profile

Editing a contact offers a great variety of preset fields and you can replicate each of them as many times as you like.

Personal ringtones and videos can also be assigned to a contact. If you prefer you may group your contacts and give each group a specific ringtone.

An enormous variety of fields is available when editing a contact

Synchronization is also nice and easy although you do need the Ovi Suite for things to go smoothly. Sending and receiving contacts via SMS or Bluetooth is also a piece of cake.

The Call log on the Nokia E5 is organized and efficient, typical Symbian. It holds up to 20 call records in each of the tabs for outgoing, received and missed calls. These are all accessed by pressing the Call key on the homescreen.

The call log is there to keep track of your communications

If you enter the Log application from the main menu, you’ll see a detailed list of all your network communications for the past 30 days. These include messages, calls and data.
Telephony

Signal reception is good on the Nokia E5, though we did get an occasional dropped call in areas of very poor coverage. In-call voice quality is great with loud, crisp sound. Vibration is also strong enough to make sure you never miss an incoming call or message.

Smart dialing, a staple of the Eseries is of course available on the E5.

Calling Dexter on the Nokia E5

The results from our loudspeaker test are at your disposal – Nokia E5 turned out to be a good performer. Check out the table showing how it stacks up beside some of the handsets we’ve put to the same test.Speakerphone test Voice, dB Pink noise/ Music, dB Ringing phone, dB Overal score
Nokia E72 65.7 60.2 66.3 Below Average
BlackBerry Bold 9000 70.0 66.6 68.9 Average
Sony Ericsson Aspen 71.0 66.6 75.7 Good
Nokia E5 75.1 66.2 75.7 Good
Nokia C3 75.8 66.6 77.5 Very Good
LG GW300 78.6 75.7 80.7 Excellent

You can find more information about the test itself and the whole list of tested devices here.
Corporate messaging can do Twitter too

The Nokia E5 has great messaging capabilities. With a comfortable QWERTY keyboard and solid software support, managing your correspondence is as good as it gets on this kind of devices.

The Messaging department

The E5 handles all common message types – SMS, MMS and email. It also supports more specialized ones like Microsoft Office Communicator (which is a replacement for the Microsoft Exchange Messaging server) and the most popular social networking platforms.

Texts and MMS share an editor. Things are pretty straightforward here so you’ll get the hang of it right away.

Turning an SMS into MMS is as simple as adding any multimedia content

The email client is also quite similar to what previous Symbian powered phones have offered. The app can automatically detect the settings for over 1000 email service providers, all you have to do is enter your username and password.

There is support for attachments, signatures and basically most of the things you can think of, so the Nokia E5 can meet almost any emailing needs. There’s even a preinstalled document viewer on the E5 so you can view attached office files.

The email client

The Microsoft Office Communicator is available through the Contacts app in two separate tabs. Each company can set up their own Communications Server, which allows for IM style chatting with co-workers. This covers group chats, showing personal availability and also quick ways to email or call a contact.

If you’ve been using some IM program for work, the Communicator comes as a “serious” replacement. It’s available for select other Nokias (both S60 and S40) – check the Ovi Store.

The Nokia E5 also supports Ovi Chat, which is a part of Ovi Contacts, as well as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace – we’ll cover those in their own sections.
Ovi Contacts for personal chatting

The Ovi Contacts app comes preinstalled on the Nokia E5 but you can also install it on most other Nokia smartphones. It integrates tightly with the Contact list and you can easily switch between the two.

Contacts are synced with the Ovi cloud (along with calendar items and notes) and they can either be existing Ovi Contacts or G-Talk users (that’s Google’s own IM service, which is also integrated into Gmail).

Thanks to the Ovi Contacts and Ovi Chat integration, you will be able to chat in real time with all your Ovi/Google Talk-connected contacts, change your status messages and mood, and all that kind of social stuff.

Ovi Contacts is a capable IM client

Ovi Contacts can also be used to share the name and artist info of the track you’re currently playing. Using the built-in GPS receiver, it can share your location too.

You can use Ovi Sync to synchronize your contacts and organizer items with the cloud

While you probably don’t have many contacts using Ovi for chat, chances are quite a few of them have a Gmail account and they can use that to chat with you. They could use iGoogle as well or a desktop client such as G-Talk. Multi-protocol clients can usually handle G-Talk too.

Great image gallery

The image gallery used on the Nokia E5 is the Nseries Gallery that’s been around for quite a while. It offers all the needed functionality and works quite fast.

Browsing the image gallery

Photos can be organized by Albums and you can add tags to them – so even if you have a vast photo collection, the Nokia E5 will keep things neatly in order.

Zooming in • Tags and Albums keep things organized

Zooming and panning are fast and smooth even for 5MP photos. Not that we expected anything different from a 600MHz processor pushing images to a QVGA screen.

Using the Home Media app, you can easily share photos, videos and music from your phone over Wi-Fi with DLNA capable devices and also play files from those devices directly on the Nokia E5.
A decent music player

There’s little diversity in Symbian music players – the one on the Nokia E5 is the exact same one found on Xseries devices (not that it’s a reason to complain in this case). It handles the most common audio formats – MP3, AAC, eAAC+ and WMA, and the standard 3.5mm audio jack is a welcome perk.

The music player “Now playing” interface

Sorting your songs by artist, album, genre and composer is automatic and searching tracks by gradual typing of the desired name is also available.

Searching the music library

It is worth noting that the 1200mAh battery of the E5 is supposed to play music up to 38 hours on a single charge. That’s two and a half days – music fans should be pleased.

The player comes with five equalizer presets and, should they seem insufficient, you can edit them or create new ones in a matter of seconds. There are also Bass Booster and Stereo Widening options.

Five equalizer presets are available • creating a new one • Bass Booster and Stereo widening are here
Audio quality is great

Nokia E5 is rather quiet when headphones are attached but provides one of the cleanest outputs we have seen so far. It did greatly in every aspect of our test and given its price rage, that’s a pretty good achievement.

The frequency response is perfect and none of the other readings is anything to frown at either. From noise levels through dynamic range and distortion levels to stereo crosstalk, the readings are just great, comparable to the best in class.

Here go the results so you can compare it to some of the other handsets we have tested.Test Frequency response Noise level Dynamic range THD IMD + Noise Stereo crosstalk
Nokia E5 +0.07, -0.40 -90.0 90.1 0.0063 0.016 -91.5
Nokia E72 +0.05, -0.26 -88.3 88.2 0.012 0.024 -88.8
Nokia C6 +0.11, -0.80 -90.5 90.2 0.0091 0.884 -90.4
Nokia C5 +0.05, -0.25 -87.6 87.4 0.0046 0.019 -87.8
Nokia C3 +0.07, -0.63 -89.2 89.3 0.012 0.021 -70.3
Sony Ericsson Aspen +0.12, -1.11 -79.5 82.5 0.025 0.082 -79.8

Nokia E5 vs Nokia C6 frequency response graphs

You can learn more about the whole testing process here.
Video player does the job

Nokia E5 features Real player (as Symbian phones typically do). You can browse and watch your videos in the gallery, file manager and the Video Centre – they’ll be handled by the Real player either way, the only difference will be in the layout and the browsing experience.

The Video center

With such a small screen though, video playback is not this phone’s strongest suit. And to confirm that, you’ll need to install a third-party player if you want a taste of DivX/XviD video.
FM radio with RDS and Internet radio

The FM radio on Nokia E5 has a nice simple interface and can automatically scan and save the available stations in your area. RDS is supported of course.

The FM radio interface

And if you get bored with local radio stations, you can switch on the Internet radio and listen to a long list of stations broadcasting on the World Wide Web. Station directories are available per country and per genre so finding something you like wouldn’t be a problem.

The Internet radio can tune in to stations from all over the world

Keep in mind that Internet radio uses your phone’s data connection, so make sure it fits your data plan. The connection bitrate can help reduce traffic if you’re not on an unlimited plan.

The Shazam app is available and ready to perform TrackID duties if you need it.

5-megapixels on fixed focus

The Nokia E5 is equipped with a 5 megapixel fixed-focus camera for a maximum image resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels. It has a LED flash but no lens protection whatsoever. This means that the glass covering the lens is prone to finger smudges and perhaps occasional scratches.

Camera interface

The camera is the first 5MP snapper without autofocus we’ve seen so far. The E5 is not a camera phone by any means, it’s what you use when you’ve forgotten your point and shoot camera.

As far as settings go, the camera on the E5 offers several scene presets, one of which is user defined. There’s limited control over light sensitivity (it has low, medium, high and auto settings) as well as some control over sharpness and contrast.

The bar on the right side of the screen hosts a set of shortcuts to various camera settings. You can add and remove shortcuts so you can have quick access to the settings that matter to you – adding to a total of 16 viewfinder shortcuts.

The rest of the settings include flash control, self-timer (2, 10, 20 seconds), night mode, automatic panorama mode and multi shot.

There’s also a Sequence mode to let you capture consecutive images at a predefined interval (from 10 seconds to 30 minutes).

The image quality is below the best of the 5MP range but still, the Nokia E5 produces, some quite usable photos. The contrast and color rendering are good and the amount of captured detail is decent. However, the produced images are quite noisy, which combined with the sharpening algorithm, produces jagged edges. The noise reduction algorithm also has a tendency to smear out areas of low contrast.

The major missing feature – autofocus – becomes apparent when you try to take a macro shot. Anything closer than 50cm is a no-go.

Nokia E5 camera samples
Synthetic resolution

We also snapped our resolution chart with the E5. You can check out what that test is all about here.

Nokia E5 resolution chart photo • 100% crops
Video recording

As for video recording, the Nokia E5 shoots in VGA resolution at 15 fps. Videos are MPEG-4 encoded. Although the specs sound decent, the quality is quite poor actually. The compression is dialed a bit too high, which brings the effective resolution down, and the modest framerate brings down the quality even further.

Video recorder interface

Here’s a video sample from the Nokia E5 – VGA@15fps.
Good connectivity

The Nokia E5 has all the connectivity basics covered – quad-band GSM/EDGE make sure that if there’s a GSM network around you can connect to it. Tri-band 3G is also available and offers blazing fast speeds – 10.2Mbps HSDPA and 2Mbps HSUPA.

The E5 has Bluetooth covered too – v2.0 with A2DP – and also Wi-Fi b/g (no 802.11n support though). You can also tick the UPnP and DLNA checkboxes.

The microUSB port can be used both for charging and for data connections. In the case of the Nokia E5, this will probably be the quickest way to transfer a few files to the microSD card, since it’s hidden under the battery.
The browser is great, the screen not so much

Browsing the Internet on the Nokia E5 is as good as it gets on a non-touch phone. Even the most elaborate pages are rendered well.

For navigation you get a virtual mouse cursor and a mini-map, which can help you find your way around large sites where lots of scrolling is required. The mini-map activates automatically if you scroll longer, and you can use it as an overview.

The zoom level is also easily adjustable and searching for text on a page is straightforward. Scrolling, panning and zooming are fast in all but the most complex pages.

The large amount of RAM (256MB in this case) though means that you’re unlikely to get any “Out of memory” error even for content-rich websites.

The very good web browser downed by the small display

The browser offers goodies like visual history, form and data saving and multiple tabs –there is no way to open a new tab however, unless the web page opens a pop-up. This is an old problem with the Symbian browser and we’re not getting our hopes up for it to get fixed before Symbian^3.

YouTube video playing in the browser • the video playing in fullscreen

The Symbian browser has had Flash support for ages and the Nokia E5 is not an exception. Though the small screen makes viewing less than ideal and the performance is not as smooth as we would have liked. You’ll be better off using the dedicated YouTube app.

The YouTube app is easier to work with

The setback of the Nokia E5 web browser is a hardware problem, not a software one. At only 2.36 inches and QVGA resolution, the smallest fonts aren’t always readable and you have to go for larger ones. This in turn limits the amount of text that can fit on screen and will force you to scroll even more.

Organizer and apps

The time-management skills of Nokia E5, like most other Symbian handsets, are impressive. Just name the application and you can bet the handset has it.

We start exploring the rich application package with the calendar. It has five different types of view – monthly, weekly, daily, Agenda and To-do, and five types of events available for setting up – Meeting, Meeting request, Memo, Anniversary and To-do. Every event has its own unique fields, and some of them allow an alarm to be activated at a preset time to act as a reminder.

The calendar

Mobile office is also very well supported with preinstalled applications able to view Word, Excel, PowerPoint (including Office 2007 files) and PDF files trouble-free. Editing is supported out of the box – this is the Eseries after all. The final ingredient here is the included ZIP manager, which allows extracting archived files straight on your phone.

Nokia E5 handles .doc .xls .ppt and .pdf files seamlessly

The E5 sports a great unit converter, calculator and voice recorder, as well as the Notes application. The Active Notes application is also on board allowing multimedia content to be added to your notes.

Converter, calculator, recorder, active notes

The alarm application allows you to set a huge number of alarms, each with its own name, set-off day and repeat pattern.

Setting up an alarm • The World clock

The Nokia E5 features a dictionary with a very rich database. English comes preinstalled but you can also download dozens of other languages for free off the Nokia website. A message reader can read your SMS and email messages out loud, which is a great option for drivers.

The dictionary

If the gallery file-management options (which even include sending multiple files at a time) is insufficient you can use the file manager. It allows you to do almost anything you can think of with your files. Copying, moving, creating new folders – you name it and it’s a safe bet that the file manager can do it.

The file manager is great

The useful “Search” application is also aboard the Nokia E5. The application itself finds almost every item in your handset containing a given keyword. From messages to landmarks, every bit of data is checked and then all results are displayed on the screen.

Every bit of data is checked by the search application

The Nokia E5 also comes with Ovi Files. You have to install the Ovi Files connector app on your computer but after you’re done, you can access all the files on that computer from your phone or a browser on another computer. You also get “Anytime files”, which lets you store 10GB of data online that is accessible even if the computer is turned off.

Ovi Files gives you access to any file on your computer

The social side of the Nokia E5 shows when you go into the Internet menu – you’ll see many familiar names like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and so on. Only Facebook gets a dedicated app, the others are just shortcuts to the networks’ respective web pages.

The Facebook app is available out of the box

The Nokia E5 doesn’t come with any games but you can get some from the Ovi Store.
GPS receiver and Ovi Maps

The E5 comes with a GPS receiver and the Ovi Maps on board. You can browse the maps, look up addresses, plan routes, and enjoy turn-by-turn voice guided navigation. The route planning is widely customizable.

Ovi Maps

The Nokia E5 gives you a free lifetime walk and drive navigation license. With the Map Loader application for PC you can download map data to a compatible computer, and transfer it to your device to save on data charges.

The GPS receiver performance is not very impressive – it took quite a while to get a lock. For a faster fix you should enable Internet connectivity and the A-GPS.
Ovi Store

Speaking of the Ovi Store, it’s easily accessible right off the phone as well as via a desktop browser. You can download the apps straight to your smartphone or transfer them later on from your desktop computer.

The structure of the Ovi Store client is simple – the general view lists apps with their names and category, plus the price and user ratings.

The Ovi Store

Selecting an app, gives you more details – a description, storage footprint plus reviews by people who have tried it.

Final words

Back in the day, smartphones were expensive and most of the people who could afford them were the corporate type. So smartphones got better at better at handling business tasks.

Symbian may be aging but all those years of being a trusty assistant haven’t been in vain – it still offers one of the best business tools out of the box. Nokia has spiced up the E5 with social networking support to appeal to the younger crowd as well.

Whether you use it for business or for leisure texting, the key feature of the Nokia E5 – the QWERTY keyboard – is quite up to scratch. If a good keyboard is a must, the E5 is one of the cheaper options, and the feature-rich package is quite tempting.

It’s not alone in that field though – here’s what it’s competing against.

The Nokia E71 should be the first alternative you look at – its price has fallen to about E5 levels, and it’s still one of the best business phones we’ve seen. The CPU is slower and has less RAM to work with, but it handles its stuff just fine. And metal beats plastic any day.

If you have some more cash to spend, you could go for the successor – the Nokia E72. It has about the same specs as the E5 so it’s up to you if the extra cost is worth it.

Nokia E71 • Nokia E72 • Nokia E55

The Nokia E55 cuts the QWERTY in half but with practice it could type just as quick. It’s smaller, slimmer and lighter and still has more metal on its body than the E5.

The other business veteran – Windows Mobile – has some phones to offer too. The Samsung B7320 / B7330 OmniaPRO duo and the HTC Snap are mixed by pretty much the same recipe as the Nokia E5.

Samsung B7320 OmniaPRO • Samsung B7330 OmniaPRO • HTC Snap

The Nokia C3 is like the E5’s kid brother – it can’t multitask or do office work and doesn’t have a 5MP camera or a GPS receiver. But it does have Wi-Fi, solid SNS support and it goes for pennies.

Or go for landscape QWERTY and bigger, higher res touchscreen with the Symbian-powered Nokia C6. It’s pricier and can’t edit Office documents.

Nokia C3 • Nokia C6

You might be wondering where all BlackBerries have gone. The thing is, the E5 isn’t too keen to mix with the A-listers. The Curve 3G 9300 and the Curve 8520 are perhaps among the few likely competitors – mostly for being as close to a budget phone as BlackBerries get.

BlackBerry Curve 8520 • BlackBerry Curve 3G 9300

With an unlimited budget, finding a good smartphone with QWERTY is fairly simple. But on a tight budget, things start to get complicated. This is where the Nokia E5 steps in. While it won’t be the talk of town, it will answer its target customers’ needs just fine.

Source : http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_e5-review-504p8.php