The Nokia E5 Review: A Cheaper E72
by Mithun Chandrasekhar on November 30, 2010 2:01 AM EST- Posted in
- Smartphones
- Nokia
- E5
- Mobile
Performance, Battery Life and Call Quality
As I mentioned earlier in the review, the E5 is quite a usable phone, as long as you remain within the confines of the Symbian OS. I have included Opera Mobile 10 numbers on the E5 for reference.
During the page load testing, I noticed an interesting behavior; the E5 would just stop loading a page that’s more than 1-1.5MB after a couple of seconds when over WiFi. Because of this, Engadget.com was stuck at about 1.3MB for more than 3 minutes before I decided to call it quits. I noticed the same behavior while running the Anandtech battery test suite over WiFi where the phone would just refuse to load pages after iterating two times through our battery life test suite. The only way around it was to either stop and reload the page or close and reopen the browser, but neither of these worked long enough to actually complete our tests.
Battery Life
The BL-4D 1200 mAh battery powering the E5 is a step down from the 1500 mAh one found in the E72 (although it is the same found on Nokia’s current flagship, the N8). This means the talk time is going to take a hit compared to the E72, but the E5 manages to post some pretty respectable numbers. Also, the official numbers indicate that the standby time for the E5 is an incredible 25+ days while non-3G talk time is north of 15 hours. Under normal usage which included some voice calls, push-email turned on, some surfing and texting, I could get away with not charging the phone for almost 3 days.
For these tests, we ran our standard page loading suite which loads through a few dozen pages endlessly until the battery dies. Screen brightness is set to 50% and all extraneous processes are killed. The WiFi test is again missing because the E5 mysteriously refused to load our test suite after a few iterations in either the default browser or Opera.
The 1200 mAh battery in the E5
Call quality on the E5 was good overall. The sound was crisp and clear and the quality remains good even at lower signal strengths. The E5 seems to hold on to signals noticeably better than my Palm Pre Plus on AT&T in the Bay Area. Of note is the fact that the E5 kept alternating between 3G and 3.5G (HSDPA) once in a while even when kept at the same location. Average 3G speed measured a surprisingly low 725 kbps.
The speakerphone on the E5 is actually very clear and usable. It’s adequately loud to have a conversation in a normal environment with some background noise. It also holds on well at high volume without any distortions and the voice sounds quite natural albeit flat. The same goes for the ringtones which actually sound really good. Coupled with some effects Nokia dubs as “3D Ringtones”, the speaker is well upto its task. Also, being a Quad-Band GSM/UTMS device, you can expect to use the E5 in most parts of the world.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
40 Comments
View All Comments
digitalw - Tuesday, November 30, 2010 - link
when picking the right phone for you, it is not to begin with the OS and CPU speed, your needs are first then pick the phone that match them :)Akdor 1154 - Tuesday, November 30, 2010 - link
Very nice for a first review. :)A couple of thoughts - 1: On my E55, and every other S60 device I've used, clicking the centre button while in the contact number field of a new SMS will open the contact list, which can be searched by typing the contact's name. Does the E5 remove this behaviour?
2: Have they fixed the bloody email system to use Destinations instead of Access Points? This is a huge irk for me as it means I have to constantly change settings to have email come over wifi. To make things more confusing, currently "onboard" email accounts CAN use destinations, however Nokia Messaging accounts (i.e. Push email) cannot; they need to be set to a distinct access point.
mythun.chandra - Tuesday, November 30, 2010 - link
1. You are correct on this. Looks like the functionality exists, but just isn't as straightforward. Thanks for pointing it out! :)2. Nope, it's still the same old frustrating "Access Points". However, it does come with an app called "SmartConnect" installed that let's you group multiple AP's into one AP. So you can group all your frequently used WiFi AP's under one heading and use that instead. Clunky, but it works! :)
YukaKun - Tuesday, November 30, 2010 - link
It's been a great review as usual, but I'd like to make a point when you state "build quality". Who has forgotten his phone over the rooftop of the car, dropped it by accident or just throw it away by mere anger?The only phone I've seen survive almost every adversity from clumsy use are Nokia's. Hell, I even got a story from a friend who threw his like 20 or 30 mts to the next-next house into a concrete wall and survived with a scratch (the good old 5120, lol). I doubt these will do the same, but I'd like to strengthen the point in "build quality" here. Nokia deserves a 5 star rating in that department, but it's not just about "details" on the final build, but endurance also comes into account.
I'd love to see some sort of metric into that :P
Cheers!
PS: First post @AT, yay!
craig0ry - Tuesday, November 30, 2010 - link
I disagree. The older "dumbphone" Nokias like the 5120 are indestructable. My N95 held up worse than my BlackBerry. While it never "broke", all it took was one or two drops on the pavement and the exterior looked like I'd kept it in a blender.calyth - Friday, December 3, 2010 - link
I agree. My N82 didn't fare any better, and I didn't drop it. However, my Bold 9000 held up alright after a few drops, and my Bold2 9700 looks just like I bought it (and fumbles here have dropped that one too).Nokia's build quality has been circling the drain for quite a while. It's even more apparent with their feature phones.
jisakujien - Tuesday, November 30, 2010 - link
Thank you, great review. It's too bad you didn't look at Exchange functionality though -- it's pretty important for a lot of business users, and many smartphones (in my experience) have iffy Exchange support. You could have downloaded a 120-day trial of Exchange Server 2010 and had it installed in a VM in a few hours. It's actually pretty easy to install and configure (especially compared to stuff like sendmail!).mythun.chandra - Tuesday, November 30, 2010 - link
Good point. I will try to include this in future reviews with devices support MS Exchange :)Scholzpdx - Tuesday, November 30, 2010 - link
Isn't there a native Opera Mini 5.2 for Symbian? Opera Mobile 10 hangs like crazy on my Blackjack 2, but Opera Mini makes my browsing on the Blackjack 2 almost as good as my Fiance's Iphone.As I can tell, this Phone is pretty similar in speed (hardware spec) to the old Blackjack 2, so using Opera Mini 5 would drastically change that part of the review.
mythun.chandra - Tuesday, November 30, 2010 - link
Actually if I'm not mistaken, Opera Mobile is for smartphones while Mini is for java-only phones. Plus, installing Mini would have skewed the results/experience because in case of Mini, the actual rendering engine in on the Opera servers, not in the phone itself (unlike Opera Mobile).But I didn't have any issues with Opera Mobile. It worked fine by itself... :)