The Nokia E-Series Evolution

Well it is finally the time to have a good look at the Nokia E7 but first, let's have a rewind back through the development over the past few years in the Nokia E series. I'll only start at my first Nokia E-series which was the Nokia E65.

Back in 2007, I commenced my E series journey by upgrading from the ever stylish blue light 8250 to the Nokia E65. This opened up the world of syncing my mobile with the computer and accessing VOIP on your mobile. Also on the E65, we could wirelessly connect to a WLAN and surf the internet on the phone! The E65 also brough in the ability to bring your office with you by enabling us to edit Powerpoint, Excel and Word documents easily on a mobile phone  for free on QuickOffice.

Then after two years, I made the very difficult decision to choose the Nokia E63 over the E71 as my next phone. The financial decision was easy as the E63 only tied me down to a one year contract. I planned this because I felt that whilst the E71 was a good phone, there were some very simple but useful differences that convinced me not to lock myself into a 2 year contract with the Nokia E71 vs 1 year E63 contract.

The Nokia E63 had a really nice keypad. I even claimed it was the best Nokia has ever produced! One could really crank out SMSes at an unreal speed because of its unusual raised triangular keypad. It would be my first QWERTY keypad and initally I yearned for the T9 but the E63 keypad had me sold. The E63 allowed users to use the flash as a torch, unlike the E71. One more decisive factor was the 3.5mm headphone jack that came with the E63, unlike the E71 which for whatever reason, only allowed weird 2.5mm headphones to be used.

One year was soon up and it was now time to look for a new phone. It wasn't hard because part of my planning was to get the E63 for one year and use the time to wait for the E72 to drop in price. And the timing was perfect, because when the E63 contract was over, the E72 dropped to being on a $29 plan (from $49)

In terms of advancing the corporate smartphone user, Nokia hit the nail on the head with the Nokia E72, combining the best features of the E71 and the E63 to come up with a phone that has style which no phone has beaten since. What was new was the ability to import business cards by "scanning" them with the E72 camera! All the details - address, phone number, email address will all be imported into a contact record on your phone in the right categories! You could also scan a page from a book and the phone will use its 5MP auto-focus camera, to OCR the whole page and you can edit it on your phone! The GPS was vastly improved on the Nokia E72 as well compared to the E71 and well, the E63 didn't have a GPS but we did manage to find a way :) A summary of why I chose the E72 is here but in the end, this was a phone that did it all. The show-off drawcard of the E72 was that you could even turn the phone over or tap it to snooze an alarm or silence an incoming call! It was such a good phone that although I now also own a Nokia N8, I am still predominantly using the E72. However, we always want more...

So now we have  come to the next step in the Nokia E-volution and that is the "giant leap" to the AMOLED and CBD display, gorilla-glass enabled, Symbian^3 empowered, N8 channeling, Nokia E7! Now business users can get secured email, VPN connections to their Microsoft Exchange servers, a massive screen to surf the web and more little features that we are going to dig out of it! That's for tomorrow.

But to end this post, after around two hours of writing, maybe its your turn to talk. What were your thoughts on the E-series journey and if you have been along for the ride, at what stage did you join us?