Windows 8 For Nokia E7 Download
- Pros
Beautiful hardware all around. Terrific camera and camcorder. Plenty of business connectivity.
- Cons
Frustrating UI. No microSD card slot. Short battery life. Very expensive. OS is doomed.
- Bottom Line
For die-hard Symbian fans, the Nokia E7 is a beautiful farewell as the company shifts to Microsoft's mobile OS; all others should stick with Android or iOS devices.
Buying a high-end, unlocked Symbian cell phone like the $659 Nokia E7 is a dicey proposition, as Nokia has already announced it's switching to Windows Phone 7 for its future devices. But if you like Symbian, the E7 is a classy, beautiful piece of hardware. It's a step up from the Nokia N8 ($549, 2.5 stars), with one exception (which I'll get to below). It's also one of The Best Unlocked Phones. That said, while E7's larger screen and hardware keyboard solve two of the N8's major issues, all of the software-related ones remain. And the E7 is even more expensive.
- $479.99
- $455.00
- $549.00
- $209.00
Design, Connectivity, and Voice Quality
Nokia has never had a problem designing impressive hardware. The E7's sleek aluminum and glass body feels expensive to the touch. It measures 4.9 by 2.5 by 0.5 inches (HWD) and weighs a heavy but solid-feeling 6.2 ounces. It's one of the classiest designs I've seen in a while. The 4-inch, AMOLED glass capacitive touch screen looks bright and vibrant, and touch response is well-calibrated. But the screen offers just 640-by-360-pixel resolution, which doesn't match higher-end Android and iPhone 4 devices in sharpness.
There's an on-board accelerometer, compass, proximity sensor, and ambient light detector. The front panel slides up and at an angle to reveal a roomy, four-row QWERTY keyboard. It requires a somewhat tricky maneuver to pull this off, but I got used to it quickly. The flat, rectangular rubber keys are raised just enough for fast, comfortable typing. The E7 also offers on-screen keyboards, but they're a mess; predictive text is turned off by default, and the portrait mode keyboard is T9-style, which is ridiculous. Cisco 3600 switch ios image download for gns3.
The E7 is a quad-band EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) and penta-band HSDPA 10.2 (850/900/1700/1900/2100 MHz) device, meaning that it hits 3G data speeds on AT&T and T-Mobile networks both here and overseas. There's no 4G connectivity. You can swap SIM cards surprisingly easily by using the side-mounted slot; each time you do, the handset reboots and reconfigures itself automatically. This is awesome for frequent international travelers. The E7 also connects to 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi networks.
Reception was a bit below average; I heard some dropouts and computer-sounding syllables in an area with strong AT&T 3G signal. But with good reception, voice quality was quite good overall. I tested the phone with an AT&T SIM card; calls sounded reasonably clear, if slightly hollow, through the earpiece. Callers said I sounded about as good as I do on other AT&T phones.
Calls sounded clear through an Aliph Jawbone Icon Bluetooth headset ($99, 4 stars). Voice dialing didn't work well in general; the E7 had trouble understanding my commands. The speakerphone sounded clear but didn't go loud enough for outdoor use. Battery life was short at just 4 hours and 11 minutes of talk time. That used to be a typical 3G smartphone result three years ago, but no longer.
Apps, Business Connectivity, and Music Playback
The E7 runs Symbian^3, which sounds more advanced than Symbian Series 60, but really isn't. It includes just three home screens you can swipe between. Customizing them is possible, but difficult. The 680MHz ARM 11 CPU kept things moving at a decent clip, although the E7 never really felt fast in day-to-day operation. Other leading smartphones have much faster processors nowadays.
The stock WebKit browser rendered desktop HTML pages well; pinch-zoom and scrolling were fast, and fonts looked sharp. But the browser's UI was exceedingly clumsy and required extra taps even just to navigate to a URL. The preloaded Ovi Maps navigation offers free, voice-enabled GPS directions for drivers and pedestrians in 80 countries; Lonely Planet and Via Michelin travel guides are also on board. Ovi Maps isn't as easy to use as other navigation apps, but it's free and powerful. Nokia's Ovi Store lets you browse, buy, and download thousands of apps. But it's sluggish, difficult to use, and is missing many major US apps available for Android and iOS devices. You get the picture.
Nokia E7 (Unlocked)
Bottom Line: Omnisphere vst download torrent. For die-hard Symbian fans, the Nokia E7 is a beautiful farewell as the company shifts to Microsoft's mobile OS; all others should stick with Android or iOS devices.