All About Symbian - Symbian, Nokia and S60 unwrapped.
Nokia E5 - affordable QWERTY Eseries with messaging software
Published by Rafe Blandford, Steve Litchfield at 8:01 UTC, April 13th 2010
Nokia today announced a new addition to its Eseries line up. The Nokia E5, which runs S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2, is a mid-range device in a QWERTY slab form factor, with a 5 megapixel EDoF camera, comprehensive connectivity (tri-band 3G, WiFi), integrated GPS and 256MB of RAM, the first of the new raft of Nokia Symbian-powered phones to have this. It has a comprehensive social messaging software suite, with support for email, instant messaging and social networks. The Nokia E5, which can be considered a successor to the E63, will be available in Q3 2010 at a price of EUR 180 before taxes and subsidies. Read on for specs, photos and our thoughts.
The E5 is very similar in size to the E63 (115 x 58.9 x 12.8 mm versus 113 mm x 59 mm x 13 mm), but slightly smaller by volume (75 cc versus 86 cc) thanks to its more rounded profile. Due to the lower price and resultant materials the E5 is bigger than the E72 (114 x 58.3 x 10.1 mm and 65 cc). The keyboard's bottom row has been slightly tweaked with a return to the larger space bar with three (E5, E71), rather than four (E63, E72), buttons on either side. The control cluster has also been redesigned, as has the back of the device, with a mixture of plastic and metallic materials.
At €180 before taxes and subsidies, the E5 is Nokia's cheapest ever Eseries. It compares with launch prices of €199 for Nokia E63, €245 for the Nokia E52 and €350 for the Nokia E72. In the UK it should have a SIM-free street price of around £180, but, as with other products, this will fall in time.
Nokia E5 front (white variant) and back (black variant)
From the press release:
"Designed for those that want to be productive in both their professional and personal lives, the Symbian-based Nokia E5 follows the successful blueprint of devices such as the Nokia E72 and Nokia E63. The Nokia E5 combines high quality business features with all of the personal networking and entertainment capabilities that a busy professional expects from a smartphone.
The Nokia E5 is perfect for managing busy schedules with a variety of productivity applications available in the Ovi Store. And with direct access to over 90 percent of the world’s corporate email through Mail for Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes Traveler, it’s easy to keep in contact from anywhere."
Key hardware features
- 115 x 58.9 x 12.8 mm in dimensions (75 cc volume), 126 g in weight; QWERTY candy bar form factor.
- 2.4 inch screen; 320 x 240 pixels resolution
- 5 megapixel 'full focus' (EDoF) camera with LED flash.
- Integrated A-GPS
- 3.5mm AV connector
- BL-4D (1200mAh) Li-Ion battery, support for both microUSB and 2 mm power port charging.
- Quad band GSM and tri-band WCDMA (900/1900/2100 or 850/1900/2100) with HSDPA (10.2 Mbps) and HSUPA (2 Mbps).
- Up to 250MB of internal memory, 256MB of RAM (up from 128MB on the E72, for example), microSD card slot.
- Initially available in five colours: Carbon Black, Chalk White, Sky Blue. Copper Brown and Silver Gray.
- Sales package: Nokia E5-00 phone, Nokia Battery BL-4D, Nokia Connectivity Cable (CA-101), Nokia High Efficiency Charger (AC-8), Nokia Steri Headset (WH-102), Nokia 2GB microSD card (MU-37).
Nokia E5 - Silver and Copper colour variants
Key software features
- Runs S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 (S60 3.2.2) on Symbian 9.3.
- Customisable homescreen, featuring 'Contact bar', 'App Shortcut bar' and various plug-ins (email, WiFi, Music).
- Ovi Maps 3.4 (including free life time navigation).
- Nokia Messaging with easy set-up (wizard based), for both email (Ovi Mail, Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, Microsoft Exchange, and IBM Lotus Notes Traveller) and Instant Messaging (Yahoo Messenger, Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger and Ovi Chat).
- Facebook status features in the phone's address book (see your friends' current status messages) and one click access to social network sites such as Facebook and Twitter (a combination of web shortcuts and client applications).
- Ovi Store pre-installed, to download additional applications, games and content.
Our thoughts
Combining, amazingly, (nearly) all the features of the slightly more expensive E63 and the much more expensive E72, the E5 looks set to do very well indeed. Aside from battery size, the E5 matches the other models on almost every count (5 megapixel cam, WiFi, GPS, torch mode and so on), while bringing back the E71's longer space bar (hooray!) and introducing a new social home screen, previously only seen on devices like the 5730 XpressMusic.
On the tech front, the QVGA screen remains from the E5's predecessors, but in other respects the E5 leaps ahead of its predecessors, with a very welcome extra 128MB of RAM, meaning about 160MB after booting. Also interesting is the quoted 250MB of internal storage, implying that, as on the N97 mini, Nokia are finally recognising that they need to allow plenty of room for user-found and Nokia-supplied apps and patches on the "C" (system) disk.
The use of EDoF (Extended Depth of Field) technology for the camera is interesting - this is the first 5 megapixel EDoF unit that I've seen. Photo results from the E52 and E55 (both with 3.2 megapixel EDoF) were surprisingly good (see our E55 review for photo samples and an explanation of EDoF) and I'm cautiously optimistic about the unit in the E5.
As with other recent Nokia launches, the price is again the real star though. To bring all of the above in at around half the price of the E72 is simply stunning. The market for QWERTY candybars is burgeoning, as more and more people find themselves wanting to type decent amounts in Facebook and Twitter status messages, plus email and SMS, and the E5 will do very well here - we'd expect to see it on Pay As You Go, subsidised by various carriers for, for example, £140 or less here in the UK.
Watch this space for a full review of the E5 here on All About Symbian in the summer.
Steve Litchfield and Rafe Blandford
Nokia E5 in video
News Discussion
Please tell me this is a joke. It probably cost them $25 to make this phone.
also, any specs on cpu speed?
We have already have E55, E72, E75. All mid-tier S60 3rd edition business phone with qwerty keyboard.
What about a E9. S60 5th Edition Communicator with good camera?
I'm afraid Nokia is becomming the mid-tier champion and forgetting the top models.
I'm sure nokia could do a higher res version, but it wouldn't be 180 EUR.
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Originally Posted by wiltjer
i'm afraid nokia is becomming the mid-tier champion and forgetting the top models. |
It's outdated now, it will be positively antique by the time it comes out in Q3.
I fail to see Nokia's logic in announcing a phone months before it is available, any buzz created by the launch will be lost, by time this phone hits the street it will be long forgotten.
That said, i hope that the design language in this new lineup of phones isn't carried throught to my beloved n-series. I dont want my phone to look like a toy.
@Unregistered, the N8 is not official yet. As of now, Nokia is right at the bottom of the heap when it comes to top end feature-rich phones.
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Originally Posted by Unregistered
Any news about the CPU and RAM on E5 and C6? Still ARM11 and 128M (with only 50M free), I guess? While that's enough for most users, the hardware on Nokia devices (except N900) is lagging badly behind.
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I also like that the device is thicker than E72. 10mm was too thin, and the E72 was kinda ugly with the camera part sticking out so much. 12mm is perfect for a 5mp camera module.
I'm also extremely pleased about the 250MB free internal storage, the 60MB on the E52 is a joke.
But the best thing is that the forum nokia device page say this have 256MB of system RAM, which should mean it got plenty of free RAM! Hooray!
(I mean the major one, not the minor one like the longer spacebar)
Are the price this low is simply it's launched much longer after E72?
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Originally Posted by Croog
jerm: no, it's not. I still have 4 years old S60v3 with 352x416 resolution. I hate QVGA!! Nokia, shame on you. :(
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-Gene
Not all of Nokia's phone need to be high-end phones -or they will price their way out of the market.
I see I haven't missed much. 2.36 QVGA display? Surely this is a joke or is Nokia still stuck in 2002?
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