Nokia E72 means Business like Never Before

Nokia obviously felt that they nailed the market with the Nokia E71 but the show must go on and new phones need to be released. The E72 introduces various new features but in many areas, it is the best combination of the Nokia E63 and the Nokia E71 combined.

The Build
The Nokia E72 comes in with a exterior design and form factor and a much more impressive look that would feel completely at home in a black BMW car kit. The phone processor is almost twice as fast as the Nokia E71 which should be very good to know for E71 users looking to upgrade to the Nokia E72. The keyboard is solidly built with the keys giving good feedback on each press.

The keypad takes a little getting used to because the left and right selection keys can be confused with the Home, Calendar, Phone-book and Messaging keys. The back and front of the phone are very slick but one concern is whether the back lid comes off accidentally too easily. Unlocking the keypad on the E72 is a combination of left and right selection keys rather than the E63 left selection key and the bottom left key (whatever its called).The battery life seems to have improved but this could be due to the more efficient processor installed in the Nokia E72.

The Camera
The phone camera is still not there yet but has a 5MP resolution which helps introduce a very useful feature - OCR scanning. The Camera has an auto-focus which you can toggle on by lightly touching the main navi-key which leads me to the navi-scroll that has been introduced in the Nokia E72. You can scroll up and down, left or right just by lightly dragging your finger over the main navi-key. As other reviewers have found, this feature is not yet completely perfected and for this model, you may find yourself turning the touch navigation off.

With the E72, you can import peoples' business cards into your contact book, identifying what should be a person's mobile, fax, email address, business address and name.. I haven't tried too many business cards but have been very impressed so far. Also, I was able to take a photo of half a page of text and the phone imported the page into NOTES flawlessly, without any mistakes! Perfect OCR!

The GPS
Navigation on the Nokia E72 is also made more interesting, with the phone telling you when a GPS satellite link has been established and when it has been lost. This will be very useful when using the driving features or just seeing the GPS location in general. Also, I am not sure if this is new but when you are driving somewhere, you can use the zoom-out feature which allows you to get a bird's eye view of where you are going and the phone will automatically zoom back into a closer view of your directions. The Nokia Maps really leaves me wondering whether there is any real point in having a GPS system because the Nokia phone does things so well. You can have the 3D view, top down view or just the directions and how far till the next change of direction (eg 300m Left turn). Also, if you miss a turn, the phone just recalculates a new route for you.

The Small Things
With the inclusion of the accelerometer in the Nokia E72, you are able to do things such as turn your phone over to silence the phone when someone is calling you. Flipping the phone over when the alarm goes off also puts the phone to snooze mode. Another thing worth mentioning is also to do with the alarm clock. Now, finally, you can choose how long you want to snooze your phone when the alarm is temporarily silenced. It would be good if you could choose different alarm alerts for different alarms (eg Weekday work - urgent alarm like "Cubicle", Weekend alarm - soothing wake up call eg Miniature).

Overall the Nokia E72 is definitely a phone worth recommending to my fellow Nokia users. There has been nothing too disappointing to prevent me from honestly saying, well done team Nokia. E72 is a winner for us :)