Nokia e7 review

We all know what E Series stands for. Business phones. Nokia Business phones. And the Nokia E7 takes the line forward to the next level after the E72. The E7 comes as a definite upgrade for E71 and E72 users as far as I have seen and a worthy upgrade.

Main features
Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
Penta-band 3G with 10.2 Mbps HSDPA and 2 Mbps HSUPA
Anodized aluminum unibody
4″ 16M-color ClearBlack AMOLED capacitive touchscreen of 640 x 360 pixel resolution
Scratch resistant Gorilla glass display
8 megapixel fixed-focus camera with LED flash
720p video recording @ 25fps
680 MHz ARM 11 CPU and 256 MB RAM
Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n
microHDMI port 720p TV-out functionality
GPS receiver with A-GPS support and free lifetime voice-guided navigation
Digital compass
16GB of on-board storage
Active noise cancellation with a dedicated mic
DivX and XviD video support
Built-in accelerometer and proximity sensor
Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
Stereo FM Radio with RDS, FM transmitter
microUSB port with USB On-the-go
Flash and Java support for the web browser
Stereo Bluetooth 3.0
Smart and voice dialing


Unboxing :
The E7 comes in a very nice, well-sized box, with the same regular blue Nokia color. And the interior is well-equipped, might I say, as usual. Every extra you might need is in there. You have the charger, manual and data cable, the USB-on-the-go link cable which is a slightly modified microUSB jack on one end and a regular female USB port on the other, and a miniHDMI cable, which you can plug directly into your HDTV , for content streaming.

Finally, there’s the one-piece headset and some leaflets.

At this point you will notice that there’s no Memory Card included, which obviously mean… no external storage supported on the E7 sadly but there is 16 GB of on board storage.

Exterior:

The E7 is big.  With dimensions standing at 123.7 x 62.4 x 13.6 mm, the E7 is actually… huge. But that’s not it. With landscape-oriented physical keyboard devices, usability and handling is everything. And sincerely, the E7 beats the crap of any other device as far as usability and handling are concerned. And above that, its looks is a killer. Sliding its keyboard open and placing it on a desk has a definite eye-catching effect.

SLIM.

The E7 is thin. Surprisingly thin.

HEAVY.

at 176 g, the E7 cannot but be considered a heavy device. But hey, if I wanted a lighter device, I wouldn’t have chosen the E7. And guess what? We’ve got a fantastic aluminum casing which really looks heavy-duty. Not only looks… it is super heavy duty. As per our stress-test, the E7 can handle a 2-meter fall on plain asphalt without a single scratch. Certified.

Design and construction

Up above the display is a central earpiece, alongside a video-call camera on its right side. On the left are the ambient light and proximity sensors.

Below the display is the menu key. In our opinion, the menu key on the N8 looks better. Sexier maybe. Simpler.

The top of the Nokia E7 holds a power key, an HDMI port which is covered by a glossy black plastic cover, the charging microUSB port and the 3.5mm audio jack.

The microUSB has a nice tiny LED to indicate charging status.

The Nokia E7 left-hand side packs the screen lock/unlock slider.On the right, you’ll find a sliding volume rocker.

The dedicated camera key and the SIM card slot are on the same right side too.

The bottom of the Nokia E7 has nothing but the micro mouthpiece.

The back panel of the E7 holds an 8 mega pixel fixed-focus camera sensor accompanied by a dual LED flash.

Coming from a Nokia N8, you would feel a bit downgraded, but then again, this can be somewhat justified by the different category of users the E7 is targeting. Business users for the E7 versus multimedia freaks for the N8.

Then comes the loudspeaker along with the second microphone used for active noise cancellation and stereo sound recording.

The Nokia E7 has the same 1200 mAh LI-Ion BL-4D battery as the N8. and the battery isn’t user-replaceable.


So, all around, the E7 will give you a solid feel, a feeling of strength and security. It will just feel… well-built.

You cannot do better than that. Everyone will agree that the build quality is the best.


Sliding keyboard

Fitting a full QWERTY physical keyboard into a device as slim as the E7 is an achievement. . Nokia really did a great job on this one.

The slider and hinge mechanism used are roughly the same ones used on the N97 But its all metal and feels sturdy.You have to use your two thumbs to push the side of the display away from you. At first, still not used to it, I had the feeling that I was going to pop the device away. After  A little getting used to it got better and I can even do it with one hand now.

there is the nice comfortable keyboard with four rows of well-spaced keys, with a rubberish feel. The keyboard back lighting is very well done, with no gaps left to fill, so is overall looks and build. No cracks whatsoever, no weird sounds. Operation is smooth and silent.

Display:

The Nokia E7 has a 4” ClearBlackAMOLED display of nHD resolution. It is quite impressive, fact. More impressive than any HTC device, and can easily rank equally with the best Samsung out there.

What it does better than its predecessor, the N8, is not only the size. It also packs the new Clear Black technology Nokia is so proud of.

The E7’s AMOLED display is there to impress with image quality: outstanding black levels, ultra-wide viewing angles and good color renderings. Sunlight legibility is great. Direct sunlight won’t be that big of a problem.

The E7 screen has nHD resolution with 360 x 640 pixels. It doesn’t rank as good as other Android phones or the Retina Display, especially when viewing pictures and multimedia content.Concerning the touch sensitivity, it is pretty impressive. Above that, there’s the Gorilla Glass, which is really very hard to scratch.


Multimedia.:

Symbian music player

There is nothing to be astonished in the Symbian Music Player. Only bonus with Symbian^3 is the Cover Flow-like interface, adding some nice UI.

There are five equalizer presets, but you can’t create a custom one.

Quite naturally, the player can also be minimized to play in background, and control it through a widget on the home screen.


Awesome audio quality

The Nokia E7 is a loud beast.

I tried attaching the E7 to an active external amplifier (My living room home theater amplifier). It did awesomely great!

Headphones experience is totally enjoyable. No glitches to be pointed out here.

FM radio with RDS

The FM radio on Nokia E7 has a simple UI and supports RDS.

Good video experience

The E7’s video player comes with DivX and XviD support out of the box.

The playback was silky smooth on all files with a resolution up to and including 720p, which is quite impressive. We did our tests in this field with 720p recorded films. Many phones wouldn’t play it smoothly. Most of them in fact. The E7 nailed it right upfront. Good points there.

8 mega pixels – no Auto focus

The Nokia E7 sports an 8 mega pixel camera for a maximum image resolution of 3264 x 2448 pixels alongside a dual-LED flash.

However, this is Nokia’s 8MP fixed-focus camera module. Quite a disappointment.Basic functionalities is there. White balance, color tone, exposure, ISO, contrast and sharpness settings are all present.Face detection is also available. Geo-tagging too. Auto-focus would have come in handy, especially on a device that expensive but I think Nokia wanted to keep the device slim so the trade off.

Video recording

The Nokia E7 shoots in 720p resolution at 25 fps and offers digital image stabilization.
The secondary camera is good for video calling and is of good quality.


What I think:

Well this is a great device and is a very good upgrade for any E series user with an older E series device. I will recommend this phone to anyone who wants a great business device and trust me it wont let you down on that front. It will keep you smiling when people admire its looks and you will feel good about the build quality. In short its a great phone with great signal quality and  build quality. There is also the USB on the go feature and it proved very useful to me at times and  it makes you forget that you are not having expandable memory as i even connected and used 16 GB pen drives easily.

If you have any questions or comments just email me or leave a comment

IE 9 review

This review has been requested by many of my readers and one of my close friends Justin. The reason I am not posting much these days is my exams are near and I was studying in overdrive. Anyways IE 9 is out and can be downloaded from the Microsoft website. The website is still in beta stage so its not come up as a windows important update to all yet but that depends on your region. Its mainly aimed at win 7 and Vista users. Microsoft keeps it in mind that you are running a good system with the latest hardware and wants to harness the power of your system to give you a better experience with the web.

    So as I said that you need a fairly good system to run it smoothly. So if you have a old system then you might have issues running it smoothly. But if your system is made in the last two years then you should be able to run it properly. Only people who are having issues are people who are running xp config pcs so people who are having pcs made for vista or win 7 will not have issues.

  The thing I like about the IE9 is that its made to harness your pcs power and give you good results for it. Its the only web browser that will use the graphics card in your pc and it will give you better results on flash frame rates compared to other browsers. I used it on my pc and found it to be very zippy and fave me better frame rates than the opera. So it will be great for online videos and flash based games.

Ok enough being said I will go directly to the features

IN CONTROL: Don't want to use ActiveX controls? You can turn them all off and then reinstall one by one if you really need them (like Flash, If you are on a fixed data plan) So this solves the browser being slow like IE 8 cause you can customize your addons.

Resemble downloads: You can pause your downloads and then resume them later, now that's   a great feature to have.

Higher Gpu support: The IE9 beta introduced hardware acceleration from the GPU for rendering web pages, improving the speed at which graphics are drawn onscreen. This was a major leap forward, and with the rise of browser games like Farmville, it could win over fans of rich web apps. If you don't believe me just install the IE9 and go to to this website. Check the frame rate you will get on IE 9 and your other browser. you will be Impressed. I was able to get  56 fps at even a 1000 fishes on IE9 at a resolution  of 1680X1050  .  There is also a  GPU OFF feature, If your GPU isn't up to the job of hardware accelerating you can turn it off (Like to say if you were on a laptop)

NEW TABS: Put your tabs on a separate line - that's a feature we all wanted.

WEBM: Want to use WebM? Install the codec and IE9 RC will use it if the web site requests it. That's a add-on for any person who has use for the WebM codec and now you don't have to get another browser for it.

QUICK SEARCH: Search faster by putting a question mark at the beginning - the search button does it for you quickly and better. so a good thing to have over the IE8

FIND ME:  There is  geolocation in the browser and the info bar lets you share your location. It can be set to one time always or never.

Optimize battery: The biggest impact of this is on battery life, and mobile users will suffer as a result. IE9 uses the power options in Windows to decide what performance settings are most appropriate for your system. If you're on a notebook and you're running on battery, IE9 slows its timer right down to save power

NEW LOOK: A slightly different interface; Hide Tabs moves down and Suggested Sites arrive. According to me it looks better specially on win 7.

Final word :

 IE9 feels like a polished browser, worthy of competing alongside the likes of Chrome and Firefox for the first time in recent memory. With GPU on chip becoming standard, and the rise of Sandy Bridge and Fusion-based machines. The improvements are not directly proportional to the usage of the system resources. IE9 is a leap forward up for Microsoft, and they've done a fine job. Some of the features in Internet Explorer 9 are genuinely innovative, and as it's well placed to usher in a richer web experience. The browser is very impressive. There are even a few mac people who are trying to get IE 9 on the mac ... That says that this is a great browser surely.

So what are you waiting for just download the IE 9 from the Microsoft website and check for yourself. As usual if you have any questions or comments just email me or leave a comment. 

Google Nexus S

The Google Nexus S is the successor to the Google Nexus One and is Google's "reference" phone for Android handsets that will be released in 2011. Intended for developers and more hardcore phone enthusiasts, the Nexus S comes stock with Android 2.3 (codename: Gingerbread) which is free from all the extraneous apps that manufacturers and carriers add which is a good thing. This is a great geek phone for all us geeks out there.

Hardware wise the device is based off of Samsung's successful Galaxy S featuring the same 400x800 resolution Super AMOLED screen(could have been better), and Hummingbird 1Ghz CPU, and adds a Near Field Communications (NFC) chip. Unlike the Nexus One the Nexus S cannot be purchased directly from Google but is instead available in traditional retail outlets so that is good news as we will be able to get it easily..  well hope so

Key Features

Runs Android 2.3 software

4" 800x400 resolution display

512MB RAM

16GB storage

B/G/N WiFi

User replaceable battery 

1500 mAH

6 hour talk time

428 hour standby

5 megapixel camera

front facing VGA camera

Near Field Communications Chip

Three-axis gyroscope

Anti-fingerprint display coating

Internet Calling (VoIP/SIP) built in

Things I like 

Runs the latest open source Android operating system (2.3)

16GB internal storage( could have been better but its good)

Slightly concave "contour display" - improves usability over perfectly flat

Powerful 1GHz Hummingbird CPU (A8 based)

4" WVGA Super AMOLED display (800 x 400px)

Built in gyroscope

Includes Near Field Communications chip making the phone future proof when the technology becomes more widely used

Front-facing camera for video calling

Things I Dint like 

No micro SD card slot for storage expansion

Phone exterior looks cheap with that plastic

Glossy black plastic enclosure - looks cheap, picks up fingerprints easily

No HSPA+ (cannot take advantage of any networks highest speeds at ~21Mbps)

No HD video capture

Display resolution could have been better

No notification lights

All being said this still is a good phone to wait for and should be a great buy. You will have a detailed review of it when the phone is out. 

As usual if you have any questions or comments just email me or leave a comment

Nokia C6-00 review

The Nokia C6-00 looks exactly like the popular Nokia 5230 but there are some differences when you look closer. First there is a full physical qwerty keypad  on the C6 and then there are the UI home screen and software like that that Nokia has for some reason deprived the 5230. I think Nokia wants to keep taking risks by this move cause according to me if they would put the UI homescreen on the 5230 (which the 5230 has the hardware to support) then the competition will totally be killed. Many people hare putting mods on the 5230 to get the UI through some software's anyway. Moving on reminding myself that this review is for the Nokia c6-00 so lets see how the phone scores.

The Nokia c6 has a very good feel to it in terms of build quality like all Nokia products and the Plastics feel good and confidence inspiring to hold.It has a  3.2 inch resistive touchscreen with  16M colors and a resolution of 360 x 640 pixels. It has a 3.5mm headset jack with good quality sound. There is a Internal memory of 240 MB and there is a card slot present which supports microSD, up to 16GB, 2GB included. The phone has 3G and wifi  capabilities. and also has Bluetooth with A2DP support. The phone has a 5 MP autofocus camera with resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels with LED flash The camera quality was very good for a phone of its price range. there is also a Secondary QVGA camera for video calling. The Os on the hone is Symbian OS v9.4, Series 60 rel. 5.

The phone has a 434 MHz ARM 11 processor which feels good and enough to handle the UI and feels zippy. There is a browser that supports WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML and also RSS feeds. The audio player and video player is very good and makes a good multimedia phone. The phone has a 1200 mAh battery and has good battery life.

The only downside I have to this phone is that it feels a little bulky because the phone is 16.8 mm thick and 150 gms is heavy but its ok to carry the bulk cause the phone is fully loaded with features to justify the bulk. The first row of the qwerty keypad is also a little too clost to the slider so it will take a little time to get used to it.

So people who are looking for a good entry level smart phone with decent features take a look at this phone But if you are a power user then this phone is not for you cause under constant data use the battery will only keep you up to a day max, not what a power user needs.

As usual if you have any questions or comments just email me or leave a comment.

Razer Switchblade

The Razer Switchblade is a highly portable, handheld PC gaming device with dual 7" multi-touch displays. The second display features a layer of tactile, dynamic keys which adapt to different gaming situations. This is a great product from a company which has given us gamers a lot of cool gaming gear.

Additionally, the Switchblade sports an Intel Atom processor, a pre-installed copy of Windows 7 with a custom user interface and a 128GB solid state drive.

The Switchblade's dynamic keyboard can be set with whichever control scheme best suits the current game being played, allowing for full-sized keys and proper functionality in a small form factor.

The Razer Switchblade has mini-HDMI output - capable of outputting visuals onto a larger display and runs Windows 7 which is a great thing and They have gone through the pain of customizing the OS. I like its small, portable form factor and will be good for travel. It has a completely customizable keyboard - each key is an LED backlit LCD display, customizable per game controls. There is custom unknown hardware - clear support from Intel, and other un-named companies? Potential for this to materialize once finalized.There is a 128GB SSD - large enough for big games, faster, and more physically resilient than disk based storage and is much more storage then the other devices of this size. Razer is saying 4-6 hours of gameplay on battery so that's good news.This will be amazing for WoW and other MMO players.The build quality matte black build is said to be Top Noach.
The only drawback that seems to me  is the screen is a bit to small and  keyboard lacks standard key layout - poor for regular computer use.

So this Product is expected to launch in April and at that time I can give you a complete specs and verdict of whether to buy it or not. But it does seem a very good device for game fanatics.

As usual if you have any questions or comments just email me or leave a comment.

Apple iPad 2

The first upgrade to Apple's mainstream tablet device, the Apple iPad 2 was announced on March 2nd 2011. The major Upgrade was  an improved dual A5 processor for double speed and 9x the graphical performance. The iPad maintains the original 10 hour battery life while being 33% slimmer and 13% lighter.

This Upgrade brings the  the iPad closer to the iPhone 4 spec, the device now includes dual front and rear facing cameras for video capture and use with Apple's FaceTime video chat service, as well as a gyroscope for full motion game controls. Yes I now what you are thinking All these are in the Samsung Galaxy tab so maybe Apple did this upgrade in order that the Ipad does not loose its market share from the other tablets.

The one major new feature of the iPad 2 is the new magnetic cover system. Magnets built into the device now allow for covers to attach and protect the device without needing to be manually fiddled with. The magnet system also allows for the device to know when it is being covered or opened - making it automatically sleep and wake up without any other user interaction. There is a drawback though - The cover only protects the screen and not the back of the device. The device will launch with plastic and leather covers available directly from Apple.

Things  I  Like

Much more powerful - new dual-core A5 processor provides double the processing power, 9x graphical performance of the original I pad and now its closer to the other new tablets

Dual cameras - FaceTime and other video conferencing, image and video capture- Much needed as this was where the Ipad was lacking.

33% slimmer than the original

Capable of HDMI output up to 1080p

3% lighter - 1.3lbs vs 1.5lbs

Maintains the original iPad's 10 hours of battery life despite being slimmer, lighter and more powerful Thank God they dint reduce that.

Compatible with 'intelligent' magnetic covers and cases - automatically goes to sleep and wakes up when covered / uncovered


Things I dint like

HDMI output requires an overpriced adapter So no direct HDMI socket.

No SD Card slot. Have to purchase an expensive add-on To do that.

No upgraded Retina display - display resolution is lacking next to the iPhone and is same as the previous Ipad

Just a speed bump - no big upgrades / really useful features when compared to the previous model.

SO do I think you should upgrade to the New Apple Ipad. well If you already have a iPad or any good tablet it makes no sense to do so, so don't do that. In the Other case if you are in the market for a tablet and you Don't mind paying a Premium (Cause there are devices that will do this and more for less price) then you can buy it although be ready for hidden costs and expensive attachments later. Personally I wont buy it and would pick up a Motorola zoom or a Blackberry Playbook or a Samsung Galaxy tab 2 cause they offer me much more for my money.

As usual if you have any questions or comments just email me or leave a comment.