The Nokia E72 replaces the popular E71 as the company's newest top-end hardware for office suits. Like its predecessor, the new smartphone comes with a bevy of business talents and messaging features that help it live up to the high expectations laid out by the earlier model's success.
Physically, the phone sports attractive high-end looks. It's not as sexy nor as sleek as the E71, but it remains particularly polished. Build is very sturdy and the handset feels good in the hand. The 2.36-inch QVGA display looks clear and bright, even under sunlight.
Both the navigation array and the QWERTY keypad work great. They keyboard is actually a mirror of what was on the Nokia E63, rather than the E71. It's no problem, though, since both keypads manage to provide the same comfortable messaging experience. My favorite change, however, is the trackpad functionality integrated into the direction pad, which, in our tests, was even more responsive than the Blackberry's.
As a phone, the E72 manages excellent calls with clear sound and no noticeable interference, thanks to Nokia's excellent noise canceling tech. It lacks a little more volume at the upper range, though, so that could be a problem when you're in busy environments. The loudspeaker is surprisingly below average, especially for an E-series device. Battery life is ridiculously impressive at up to 12 hours of talk time and it lives up to that rating in real-world use.
For business users, this could very well be one of the most feature-rich devices around. It boasts wide messaging support, Exchange compatibility, and one of the most elaborate collection of productivity tools and utilities in a phone (e.g. built-in VPN, Quickoffice and more).
The music player is standard Symbian fare, but the audio quality is topnotch. In fact, it easily offers the best music experience out of any E-series device. The video player is decent, but nothing to write home about, especially since there's no native support for DivX. A 5.0 megapixel camera comes with the phone and it's very impressive. There's an extensive amount of settings (laid out in a nice, tabbed interface) and very warm image quality.
Web browsing can be tough on the small display, but pages load quickly and there's full Flash support (most web videos work great, but it frequently chokes on streaming games). It offers both 3G and Wi-Fi, and even comes with a VoIP module to take full advantage of it.
Overall, the Nokia E72 follows the tradition of the E71 as a solid messaging phone that's fit to slug it out with the best business smartphones on the market. At the price (around $400 to $450 unlocked, depending on where you buy), it sounds like a really solid purchase.
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E72 is not a refinement of the E71. I own both phones and the E72 is a big step BACKWARDS on build-quality and contains beta-software with lot’s of bugs. And build-quality was Nokia’s only selling point left .. if you ask me .. and that’s gone now too.
My personal opinion is that Nokia is making wrong strategic decisions. They should produce less phone models and put much more resources on high quality software and platform development. They are just too slow at this moment .. So refinement is not a decision … it’s just the best they can do (but didn’t ) at this moment.