Tomi Ahonen, like me, has been a heavy Nokia Communicator user over the years. And so our opinions on the Nokia E7 should be pretty similar. He has just published his long term critique of the device and, in typical Tomi style, there's no holding back in terms of volume of words (so get yourself a coffee before settling down to read). While we do agree on many aspects of the E7, both good and bad, there are many, many notable criticisms made by Tomi that are well, well worth a response in the device's defense. 

First of all though, note AAS's original review parts:

Nokia E7, part 1 - Overview and Detailed first impressions

Nokia E7, part 2 - Camera and Camcorder functions

Nokia E7, part 3 - Multimedia and Gaming

Nokia E7, part 4 - Communications and PIM

Nokia E7, part 5 - Internet, Security and Productivity

Nokia E7, part 6 - Navigation, Utilities, Homescreens, Wrap-up

Points of agreement

Tomi's point about the E7 being aimed at the Nokia loyalist (as opposed to brand new smartphone users or existing Android, RIM or iOS users) is a good one, the two of us aren't alone and there will be many Symbian die-hards looking to move on from the E90 and eyeing the E7 up. Tomi's also right about the E7 being perfectly pitched, in theory, to be the centre of a mobile office setup, with Bluetooth peripherals, HDMI monitor out, and so on. And he's right about some of the E7's physical limitations rather getting in the way of realising this dream.

The big ones are the fixed battery, the lack of microSD card slot and the triple purpose microUSB port. It's not only impossible to plug in both the external HD display and the USB on the Go adapter at the same time, the same port is also used for charging the somewhat anaemic 1200mAh battery. A clear physical bottleneck that really shouldn't have been an issue if a card slot and the traditional 2mm charging jacks had been included in the hardware - somehow.

I agree, Tomi, I absolutely do.

Camera capabilities

But Tomi and I start to differ when he complains about the 8 megapixel EDoF camera. He quotes a number of use cases for traditional Communicator auto focus cameras, claiming that EDoF is useless compared to even the 3 megapixel camera in our beloved E90s. While I too would have preferred a traditional camera, EDoF has also been growing on  me, as you might have guessed, and it's simply not true, Tomi, that the E7's camera can't capture ticket stubs and receipts for casual 'memory' use later. Here's my snap of some recent tickets, snapped at about a foot or so on the E7. Doesn't look good enough, does it?

But zoom in by double-tapping (or using multitouch) - or use the E7's onboard photo editor to crop to the middle bit and we can now see:

Tricky for OCR (Optical Character Recognition) perhaps, but easily good enough for Tomi's 'memory' use case, I reckon. Do you agree?

'Search' not found

Next in Tomi's firing line is that he couldn't find a search clue in his Contacts, text that wasn't a name in one of the name fields. I'm sorry, but this is deliberately ignoring a major feature of Symbian from the last few years - the Search widget and application, shown below, which searches all applications, in parallel, for any text string, however short or long.

The quick match search in Contacts is now meant for just that - quick matching names in the appropriate fields. Yes, Tomi, I know that searching on Contacts worked in all fields back on the Psion 3c in 1996 - I used to use it too. But the way the application and its descendents work has changed in the intervening 15 years. The current system just works... differently.

Large but not high-res

Tomi's next complaint is about screen resolution, with the 4" display having the same resolution as the 3.2" display from the Nokia 5800 over two years ago, namely nHD, 640 by 360 pixels. He's got a point, even my ageing eyes can spot pixellation in small text and icons, but I'd argue that the vast majority of users won't find it an issue - they'll just be glad that the screen's big and clear. 

Tomi's two main resolution demo use cases (compared to the E90) are for browsing web sites and watching videos. Taking browsing first, where the E90's raw 800 pixel horizontal resolution is, numerically, larger - that ignores the underlying speed of the older device (i.e. not fast) and also ignores the improvements made in terms of sizing and zooming for Symbian^3. If all modern web sites were coded for 800 by 600 pixel screens still then I'd agree with Tomi, but that was what desktops were using back in 2000, ten years ago. Most web sites now assume something like a 1200 pixel wide monitor/window these days - so whether the native horizontal resolution of your device is 800 or 640 pixels is largely irrelevant - either way, you're going to be zooming in and out a little (in the E7's case, really easily, with multitouch) to see text at a level you can read.

I've spent hours browsing around on the E7 and the main issues have been bloated sites with mountains of unnecessary javascript and Flash - a common rant from me and one good reason to use Opera Mini instead. Rarely has the native resolution of the device been an issue.

Tomi's second complaint has been for watching videos (c.f. the E90) - and this I don't understand at all. Getting videos onto the E90 in a form that its RealPlayer could understand and yet which also somehow fitted on its ultra-widescreen display was an utter nightmare. Even with my tech expertise, I rarely bothered. Most videos I did watch on the E90 played in a smaller window in the centre of the display, making its resolution more than a little irrelevant again.

In contrast, the CBD and AMOLED display on the E7 is a joy for presenting videos and any pixellation is usually found to be in the video encoding used - I've thrown DVD-quality clips at the E7 and haven't seen any problems at all with horizontal resolution limitations. None.

QR codes

Tomi's complaints continue, bemoaning the lack of a QR code reader in the E7. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I can't name many other handsets from any era which shipped with a QR reader in their firmware. Such readers (I use the free UpCode, from the Ovi Store) work fine, even on the EDoF-equipped E7 - the fuzzy results that the eye sees on-screen for codes  closer than about a foot away don't seem to bother the utilities - I was very pleasantly surprised when trying out UpCode a few weeks back on the E7 at a science park - every code was scanned perfectly and instantly.

Calendar interface

Tomi's next point is about the bare bones Calendar software, with no combined month/day view (i.e. tap on a day on the grid and see its agenda in a separate pane) - and I wholeheartedly agree that this is a step backwards from the Calendar build for the N97 (and from previous Eseries). However, and Tomi is being a bit disingenuous in not mentioning this, the Symbian Anna upgrade is now mere days away from availability - and one of its less heralded improvements is that the full Calendar views are at last brought to Symbian^3. In other words, wait a week or so and even this won't be an issue either.

(Symbian Anna's Calendar revamp, demoed on the C7-00. Image credit: Nokia France)

 

What microSD?

Also firmly in the 'me think he doth protesteth too much' camp is Tomi's comments about the lack of a microSD card slot on the E7. Now don't get me wrong - I too believe that Nokia should have found a way to squeeze in a card slot on the device - I'm a fan of removable media, for file sharing and general flexibility. And yes, I too like to have a few extra movies squirrelled away in case I get bored on long journeys.

But. And it's a big but. I've been living with the E7 for a while now, off and on, and not once have I run out of room on the internal 16GB disk. With sarcastic tongue firmly in cheek, I've only got about 800 music tracks loaded and only got about six hours of videos/movie clips - but isn't that enough?! And I still have 5GB free for podcasts, camera recordings and general miscellany. Tomi makes a big deal about the inconvenience of not being able to save Maps, photos, Word, Excel and PDF (etc) documents because the E7's disks are always filling up. But most of these formats and documents are quite tiny relative to 16GB, Tomi - can I suggest you simply delete that copy of "The Bourne Identity" movie (you've watched it three times already) and save yourself a Gigabyte right off the bat?

Yes, it's a slight hassle that disk memory is limited to 16GB (plus a little for the internal disk), but as long as you don't go silly with movies or by trying to fit your entire music collection on, 16GB is likely to be absolutely fine. Am I making excuses for Nokia? Not really, as I say, I do agree with the general complaint - I just think it's not an issue for almost every E7 user.

Other complaints

The rest of Tomi's complaints are gathered together in one tightly packed section, so I'll mirror them here.

• "Nokia has discontinued FM broadcasting" - again, extremely disingenuous. Only a handful of Nseries devices have ever had an FM transmitter built-in - there's no real reason why Nokia should have included one here. Yes, it would have been cool, I too am an FM transmitter fan, but hardly a necessity for an Eseries Communicator?
   
• "The camera has no lens cover yes, but it is totally flush with the body of the phone bottom." - This was something I also picked up in my review here on AAS and I do agree that even a millimetre of recess/protection would have been good. In practice, I keep my E7 in a £10 Nokia CC-3009 hard case and this protects the camera glass nicely - and also stops the device sliding across the desk every time I press a few keys. 8-)
   
•  "The phone has no rubber 'leg' stubs" - see above, re: agreement and the use of a hard cover.
   
• "The Microsoft office suite app is the simpler cheaper version" - I'm puzzled by this statement - the E7 has the very latest version of Quickoffice's full Office editing suite, as far as I can see. And very nice to have it is, too, even though the N8 also inherited this on a recent firmware update.
   
• "The camera is not Carl Zeiss branded?" That's because the Carl Zeiss folks don't design EDoF lenses - at least not yet. Nokia's Carl Zeiss lenses are all auto-focus. Which, I guess, takes us back to the EDoF argument, but hey. The lens and sensor in these EDoF sensors is constantly underestimated - I've been shooting recent Phones Shows on the E7 out of preference, rather than use the Nokia N8 or Samsung Galaxy S II - which should tell you something about the abilities of its EDoF optics, at least in decent light.
   
• "The keyboard has its quirkyness, why only 4 rows of keys?" Tomi argues that letting the screen slide back further would have made space for a dedicated number row. An interesting idea, though the screen support would then have to be shallower if the right angle was to be maintained and some of the rigidity of the E7's slide mechanism would have been lost. A tough one to call.
   
• "On the keyboard the shift key and function arrow key should have been reversed" - this is down to personal preference, really. I use the 'fn' key more than the 'shift' one, so for me the layout is fine. It depends what you want to type!

Tomi concludes with a wistful vision of "a revised E7, an E7B, with 1024 resolution ('retina display') resolution on the 4 inch screen, a slightly raised camera casing, with auto focus (and QR code reader); return of the replaceable battery, with SIM slot below battery and microSD card slot on outside" - to which I'd add my 'Amen', such a device would indeed be 'killer' and I'll be second in the queue behind Tomi at the E7B check-out!

Finally, as evidence that the Nokia E7, as is, is useful for getting real work done, 80% of this piece was hammered out, in Quickoffice, in a car park over a couple of hours ON the E7 (waiting for family to return). No, it's definitely not a perfect device, I said as much in my original review parts - the E7 actually represents a number of significant compromises. But trying to imply, as Tomi does, that it's a colossal failure and "not worth of the Nokia brand name" is going too far.

Way too far. I suspect that Tomi's opinions throughout have been somewhat tinged with disillusionment over the company's devices and strategies as a whole. I've tried to be objective above and present the Nokia E7 in more even fashion - comments welcome if you too are an E7 user and wish to weigh in on either side of the debate!

Steve Litchfield, All About Symbian, 29 May 2011