Now that I’ve been using the Nokia E52 for a few days, I am ready to share with you my love/hate list regarding the new baby in the Eseries lineup. This first article will take a look at the things that I love about the E52.
1. Clean elegant design
It doesn’t take a genius to notice how clean, simple and beautiful the E52′s design is. There’s no unnecessary buttons, no crowded areas, no weird lines, it’s just wonderfully elegant. You can look at it for hours and not find a single mistake in the way this beast was drawn. Coupled with a very slim form factor, a brushed metal feel, a comfortable keypad and a good screen size, the E52 is classy while still hiding behind a regular phone look. It’s one of a very rare and elite group of mobiles that won’t attract thieves but will still make a few eyes turn when they’re put on a table, and the E52 is perfect just because it achieves this compromise.
2. Responsiveness
With a processor at 600Mhz compared to other S60 devices with 369 and 434Mhz processors, the E52 is snappy. It’s fast and that speed shows specifically when you open your Inbox, your photo Gallery or your Music Player. Normally, these take a few seconds to open, on any Symbian device, but the E52 handles them instantaneously. Speed is also noticeable with 3rd-party sofware like gReader which require a good deal of processor speed to work beautifully.
3. Battery life
With the BP-4L 1500mAh battery, the E52 manages to house the best Nokia battery to date, and it shows. I am averaging 2-3 days with normal usage (intermittent email, Gravity, phone calls and SMS, with some games, music and gps) which is a first for me. I compared battery life with my Nokia E71, and subjectively, I would say that it’s a bit less. Actually, the E52 is built on the Feature Pack 2 software, so it’s supposed to be less power hungry compared to the E71 which is a Feature Pack 1 device, but the faster processor I guess consumes more power than the E71′s. Nevertheless, battery life remains phenomenal on the E52.
4. Panorama mode
We’re finally seeing Panorama mode on board of the new Nokia devices, and it’s quite exciting to find that it’s also going to be included in Eseries. Below is a sample Panorama I took of the view I have from my summer house in Kleiat, Lebanon. I always talk about this incredible view in front of my friends and how it’s gorgeous on a 360deg, but I was never able to show it to them except in detached pictures, until I decided to take it with the E52.
5. Lots of easter eggs
Last week, I wrote about how easter egg (or surprise) applications are becoming less and less frequent on S60 devices by Nokia. Although the E52 lacks many of the easter eggs I mentioned in that article, it still brings a lot of new and free surprises to users, in terms of Music Search (speak a song or artist name and it plays it), Messenger (a full Windows Live Messenger client built-in), Psiloc World Traveler (weather, currency, world clock, flight plan), Advanced Communication Manager (answering machine and voice call handling), WiPresenter (bluetooth Powerpoint presentation remote controller), Font Magnifier (magnifies the font on the screen), Can’t Stop Solitaires (15 different solitaire games) and Block Cascade Fusion (awesome Tetris spin-off game). I use all of this software regularly, but I’m particularly a big fan of Psiloc World Traveller, Messenger and the two games included.
6. Full Office support
It could sound like a given for those of us who know Eseries devices well, but I find it worth mentioning that the Nokia E52 has full Office support out of the box. Besides Adobe Reader which lets you read .pdf files on the device itself, there’s QuickOffice v5.3 which makes it possible to open, create and edit Word and Excel documents as well as PowerPoint presentations. You can update it for free to QuickOffice v6 which gives you support for Office 2007 documents as well. The E52 could possibly be one of the tiniest devices, all platforms included, to have full Office support out of the box and I personally, find it incredible.
This ends my list of 6 things I love about the Nokia E52, and although I’m a big fan of the handset, I still managed to find 6 things I hate about it that I will list to you tomorrow, so stay tuned.
