Steve Litchfield has posted his detailed review of the Nokia E5. Once again we have a competent effort from Nokia, but sadly one that looks like a Palm Centro…
I used the term ‘design language’ intentionally above. It seems that every couple of years a new ‘look’ emerges from Nokia’s design departments. We’ve had ‘industrial and square’, we’ve had ‘plastic with silly keys’, and everything in between. And now it’s time for ‘human curvature’, to nick Sony Ericsson’s term – rounded corners, rounded back and a generally ‘comfy’ feel. This in turn does have some implications for specification, in that the Eseries stalwart BP-4L battery would have been too tight a fit, so instead we’ve got a 1200mAh BL-4D battery – although an obvious compromise, in practice it makes little difference, since typical E5 users will still see an easy two or three days use per charge.
No, the big compromises made for the E5 are in the screen and the camera.
The QVGA display is a cheaper transmissive-only TFT (the E61, E61i, E71, E63 and E72 all used a Nokia standard transflective screen), meaning that it looks similar indoors but washes out to nothingness outdoors in any degree of sunlight. This is clearly a case of cost-cutting – I’d love to know what the relative costs of transmissive-only versus transflective screens of the same size are – anyone know? Regardless, this inability to work outdoors is a dealbreaker for me and, I suspect, for many others.
