Nokia E7: First Hands On, Early Impressions, Pictures

Even though Nokia might have made it clear that Windows Phone Would be their smartphone OS of choice going forward, the fact is that Symbian still happens to be one of the most used smartphone platforms out there. In fact, Nokia will continue to launch Symbian powered devices in the next few years to come. However, we might not see a major smartphone launch like this one on the Symbian platform ever again. Say hello to the E7, Nokia’s latest Symbian^ laden device – and probably the last major release on this platform.

The E7 is can be termed a successor to the classic Nokia Communicator Series of the yesteryears. The last release on this line up of phones was the E90 Communicator which showed up four years ago, in 2007. Loaded with a 1GHz processor, this probably is the first Nokia with a GHz CPU. The Nokia officials at the event clearly told us that the phone had a ” 1 GHz” CPU inside. Until now, the E7 was thought to be powered by an 680 MHz ARM 11 processor.

While the world still rumors the release date for the E7, we have got our hands on the E7 and the first impression that you get of the phone is that it is almost a replica of the Nokia N8 –  at least from a distance.

It is only when you get up close that you realize the obvious differences. The E7 gets a larger 4″ Clear Black Display, largest on a Nokia phone so far. It also gets a nice, expansive back-lit slide out keyboard that is a pure joy to type on (and yes Nokia has finally put the spacebar in center, a shift from the right aligned spacebar that we hated on the N97). You will see the same in action on the hands-on video below. On the software side, the handsets we handheld were said to be prototypes, but we could see that it still doesn’t manage to get a full QWERTY in portrait mode (yes, even with a 4″ display).

We were unable to figure out of the two holes seen on the back are noise cancelation mics or not. Nokia would get back to us on the same. Small, but something we look forward to find out.

The camera on the E7 has been “scaled down” to 8 megapixels from the 12 megapixel unit on the N8. But what you woud miss it the auto focus (no macro mode :().  It is also noticeably heavier than the N8 apart from being a tad thicker. We would wait to get a longer outing with the E7 and get back with a detailed review.

We leave you with a few pictures of the E7 and we shall have the videos coming up in a bit as well 🙂 (Update: video live!)