Nokia E7

Nokia E7 claiming to be an honorable heir of Nokia's enterprise series phones with physical keyboards. Retaining most of the wonderful features and design cues from the Nokia N8, the E7 just might have the perfect mix of ingredients, with its peculiar looking keyboard, to consider itself as being the next big smartphone from Nokia's camp.

The Nokia E7 is essentially a longer and wider version of the Nokia N8, but manages to pack on a landscape keyboard to its 0.54” (13.6mm) sleek anodized aluminum casing. you can find the Nokia E7 in a variety of colors, from silver to flashy orange.

The Nokia E7 shares the same 680MHz ARM 11 processor and 256MB of RAM that's found with the N8, but it increases its ROM to 1024MB. The phone runs the latest version of the Symbian^3 firmware. There is a high learning curve with Symbian^3, if you're using the platform for the very first time.

Seeing that the Nokia E7 is much like any other GSM phone out there in the market, which means you can place voice calls just about anywhere in the world. Even though it wouldn't be very difficult to find 3G connectivity with this device, it still packs 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi to get you plugged in when you're in a spotty location.

If you're looking for a great photo taking experience with a Nokia phone, it's clear your best bet will be the N8 with its 12-megapixel auto-focus camera with Carl Zeiss lens. Granted that we still have an 8-megapixel camera in tow with the Nokia E7, but we're saddened to see it's nothing more than a fixed focused one. That means it focuses on everything beyond 20 inches or so, but for a macro shot you'll need a magnifying glass.

Playing high definition videos is no problem for the Nokia E7, as we managed to load a video encoded in MPEG-4 1280 x 720 resolution. Naturally, its AMOLED display and relatively larger size makes for the perfect combination in watching videos in their full fidelity, but its smooth and lag-free playback complements its already premier status in this department.

 The Nokia E7 comes with the same picture and video editors that Nokia N8 has preinstalled, which have plenty of settings, and are actually quite useful for rough editing on the go, like cutting, stitching, adding text and background music to your videos, or doing basic image adjustments to your photos.

The Nokia E7 exhibits a top-notch call quality, which we are used to with the Finnish handsets, both in the earpiece, and on the receiving end, thanks to the noise-canceling mikes. The 1200mAh battery is rated for 5 hours of talk time in 3G mode, which is not all that impressive, so you'll probably have to charge it daily.if you are a Nokia fan, you won't be disappointed with the Nokia E7. If you have left the camp, or never been lured into it, the HTC 7 Pro with Windows Phone 7, and the HTC Desire Z with Android are both excellent choices with physical slide-out QWERTY keyboards.