Nokia E72 Full Review - Part 3: Performance/UI

One of the few things I’d think of changing with the E71 is its performance. One of the best if not THE best Nokia performer of all-time, the E71 was able to handle anything I threw at it, except bullets of course, but with the right application and Python runtime installed, maybe it’ll be able to do some dodging, Neo-style. So the E72 comes in this year keeping the same amount of RAM the E71 has – 128MB – which seemed great for the predecessor. The upgrade also features a new speedy processor – 600MHz instead of 369MHz, and the now-mature Feature Pack 2. One of the letdowns of the announcement back in June 2008 was the OS version. The FP2 had surfaced for a while, the N78 was out running it, but Nokia went for FP1 instead. Before I move on, if some terms sound like gibberish to you, then maybe you ought read Eldar’s review of both the FP1 and FP2. Let’s carry on. So I guess Nokia played it safe. Instead of letting its Superphone run a new OS version, Nokia decided to inject it with the stable FP1 version, along with some crappy looking icons. I could live with that feature pack but I could never look at my phone’s menu with those hideous grey icons around. They just felt...old. But now, all that has changed.



Taking it for granted that most of you reading this are either switching from an E71 to an E72, or just loving it so much they can’t wait to get their hands on it, I will not review the entire OS and Feature Pack 2, but I’ll talk about the differences you’ll see between the E71 and the E72.

1. Boot-up times:
It takes my E71 54.0 seconds to start up (the welcome animation included, stopped the timer when I saw the homescreen) so that’s a bit hard. Well, guess what? The E72 boots up in 22.1 seconds (same conditions). How about that?!

2. Free RAM:
And here’s the big surprise, the E71 manages to start with 70MB of free RAM while the E72 only shows 43MB. The gap is of course due to the fact that my device is an early proto, and none of that fancy “application memory allocation” Nokia brags about is there.


What I’d like to point out here is that the E71 has come a long way since it was first made available. Looks like most Nokia devices are 3 FW upgrades away from perfection; so Nokia, why not do those upgrades before releasing the device? I hope this gets through to whoever is concerned. I understand that major updates are based on user feedback, but the N97’s initial FW was a mess, and so was the 5800’s, the N96, etc. For the non-aware, this is a serious issue because unlike Symbian-lovers, these people will not give such devices a second chance. On the other hand, us who believe in the prowess of Symbian OS will always long for further updates and will hold on to our devices hoping one day they’d become perfect.

Back to our subject, the E71 has greatly improved (camera, speed, RAM…) over a year’s time, so I expect the E72 to boast even better features once it is out, or with the first FW update.

3. Internal memory:
The E71 does great with 110MB of internal memory. But how about 250MB? You like it? Well, you can have it on your E72. I wonder why Nokia never thought about that with the N97. It’s textbook stuff. Hopefully, the promised FW 2.0 will free up some RAM and fix the internal memory issues next month.

4. User Interface:
All the little things that used to bug you with the E71’s interface or OS are fortunately gone now. And not just the E71 but the entire FP1 clan. I’m talking about the clock not appearing in sub-menus, not being able to prioritize access points or organize destinations, the huge “small” font on the E71, the lack of audio themes, the microscopic caller ID, cropped homescreen wallpaper, the partially hidden sub-menu titles on the upper part of the screen…gone! What you’ll notice with the E72 is the following: slightly higher icons shortcut bar, bigger date/profile name, clock and notification icons (Bluetooth, missed calls, messages, emails, alarms, Wi-Fi, headset, etc.) all appear at the bottom of the screen on all menus and sub-menus, the clock is static on the right side – now I can finally use the “analogue clock” and show off Tehk, Pizero, or Dhanusaud’s amazing designs, 3 notification icons can be seen at a time not more (example: missed calls, Bluetooth and headset), improved readability over light-colored wallpapers due to the shaded background behind all the shortcuts/notifications in active standby mode, theme effects are here and they look awesome, audio themes let you customize the silliest alerts like “battery charging tone” and “memory card inserted” tone, Nseries-like rotating image gallery (more details in the 4th part of the review), the possibility to use shortcuts within the Calendar app (W for week view, D for day view, A for Agenda view, and T for to-do view) COLORFUL Ovi icons, and so on.

E71 vs. E72 homescreens


Wallpapers and white text over white background


Different notifications


Gallery


5. Usability:
And here I will mainly focus on the Navi Key and the rest of the keys but I’ll be brief about it since I had covered the keyboard in my review earlier. The keyboard is still flawless, and with the added functionality via the new labeled shortcuts and the extra keys, it rocks even more. The phone still looks almost the same, measures the same, and weighs the same so whatever issues you’ve had with the E71 are still going to be here. On the other hand, if you’ve loved the E71, you’ll adore the E72. As for the Optical Navi Key well…it’s rather a love and hate relationship really. The first thing I did after turning the phone on for the first time was to turn this option off. Why you ask? Well it requires some time to master it – it’s no trackball – and sometimes it’s just too damn sensitive. I’m not saying it’s a total failure because it comes in pretty handy at times but I never mind clicking the d-pad a couple of extra times in order to get what I want. I found it to be useful within the gallery where you can go through images at near warp-speed, it’s a nice feature when used within the Email application (while scrolling down to read an email), it’s pretty sensitive when used for the camera as it allows you to focus by simply touching it (opposed to having to fully press the mid button to focus when the Navi Key is turned off), and that’s it. It’s not that useful for browsing because it is not accurate – sometimes scrolling is dead slow whereas at other times you skip entire paragraphs with a gentle touch so I say it needs calibration. And though you can mess with the sensitivity levels (high-medium-low) I found it to be the same on all levels. Also, you can get haptic feedback-like results by turning vibration on, thus causing the phone to vibrate every time you touch the Navi key. I hope this will be fixed with the official release of the phone or else it will have the same fate as the touch-sensitive navipad of the N96. Yes, initially, the N96 had the same option as the N81. It was later on removed. Bottom line: I find it silly having to touch the Navi key a zillion times to scroll down through a long list of songs while I can double click on the d-pad (down arrow) and dash like hell!

Navi Key options




6. Multitasking:
I never had issues with the E71’s multitasking capabilities, in fact I still consider as the best multitasking mobile phone out there, yet I cannot but praise the E72’s sheer power. Pause for a moment and think about this: the E71’s power coupled with a 600MHz processor. Now read on. I was determined to bring the E72 down to its knees tonight, opening every possible application I could, proving there’s reason behind calling this device an early proto with a loony firmware, but I failed. Constantly. Here-below is a list of apps that I tried running at the same time: (copied them straight from Handy Taskman’s main window)

1. Standby
2. Quickword (began writing down silly words…)
3. Message Editor (wrote a silly note to an anonymous person)
4. Log (checked who called me today)
5. File manager (browsed the apps I intend to install)
6. Gravity (did some twitting)
7. Slick (opened my MSN account)
8. Settings (no clue why)
9. Best Taskman (a second task manager app)
10. Music Player (playing in the background connected to Bluetooth headset)
11. Themes (switching back and forth between the preloaded stuff)
12. Calendar (added a new to-do note)
13. Messaging (running in the background)
14. Bluetooth (running in the background)
15. Handy Alarm Pro (added a new reminder)
16. Adobe Reader (running in the background)
17. Quickoffice (running in the background)
18. Email (Nokia Messaging) (syncing in the background)
19. Opera Mini 5 beta (checking my blog on it)
20. Web (downloading Best Screensnap)
21. Gallery (running in the background)
22. Clock (running in the background)
23. Profiles (running in the background)
24. Notes (running in the background)

And guess what! I still had 10.1 MB of free RAM, and the performance was still flawless. No lag whatsoever. Now the tricky part. Let’s use some kryptonite. I fired off the Ovi Store app and it’s a good thing the E72 cannot talk. Think screams of pain and agony accompanied by some cussing and nausea. The phone froze just like the N86 does after installing the application. It wasn’t responding anymore so I hit the red button to bring back the homescreen. Right after that RAM was down to 5.4MB. Apparently, the Ovi Store had exited, so I got back to my initial list of processor/RAM abuse, opened a new web page to download another app, RAM up to 8.4MB. Added the contacts application, RAM down to 5.6MB. A bit of multitasking – jumping between windows, and RAM is back up to 11MB. Looks like Opera Mini quit. Fire it on again from the list of recently opened apps. Add to that World Traveler app and Handy Blacklist, the Taskman application no longer lets me scroll down. In fact, some of the apps don’t show in the list anymore or constantly appear/disappear. RAM back down to 6MB… performance still flawless, no lag. Installing the app which I’ve downloaded – RAM down to 5.1MB, and now yes NOW you can feel the lag but it’s totally tolerable. You’re scrolling a long list of names and sometimes you get that millisecond pause, so I can live with that. I closed all apps and switched to the taskmanager, RAM was back up to 33MB.


If there’s anything else you’d like me to do, then I’m ready, but I think the fella suffered enough tonight.

7. Extra features:
I will try covering the browsing aspect along with the multimedia features in my next post (radio with RDS, music player, etc), but right now I want to talk about the extra features that should make you want to ditch the E71 in favor of the E72.

First up is the accelerometer which only allows you to do certain stuff unlike normal devices where you can use it for screen auto-rotation. Here, you can silence calls and snooze alarms with it, and perhaps use it with Python to make use of some nice apps.
Next is SW update application which scans your phone and the Internet for possible updates to your pre-installed apps, or offer you some newly-available ones.

The E72 comes preloaded with Font Magnifier, Quickoffice v5 (and you’re eligible to a free upgrade to the full suite v6), Adobe Reader 1.5 but no free upgrade to 2.5, Nokia Messaging native application, Ovi Store client (which crashes at per-second rate). The phone greets you with the Phone Setup Wizard taking you through all the steps to “make it your own”, 2 pre-installed games (Block Cascade and Solitaires) are there, N-Gage is not preloaded on my handset and there’s no sign of download availability so I guess it is yet to be supported, and also the E72 features active noise cancellation which enhances speech in noisy environments. Nokia Maps is onboard, and now the phone has a compass for better navigation, IBM Lotus Notes Traveler prompts you to install it once you access the Email app and try to set up a corporate email box, and here’s something that drew my attention: the datasheet of the Nokia E72 says it comes with “Nokia Messaging service (lifetime license)” like Nokia’s trying to tell its non-Eseries users to start saving up some money for the service. With the current ups and downs, I believe nobody’s willing to pay.

Noise Cancellation



It is really not necessary to discuss battery life, first because the E71 did such a good job with its battery, and second because the E72 has the same battery and an improved OS, which means more battery life for us users. A small example on this is my current battery level which is down to 3 bars, the phone has been on for 3 days with some extensive testing, lots of photo snapping, Bluetooth audio streaming, around an hour of phone conversations, SMS, email, Wi-Fi, and music through the loudspeaker… Yes, 3 bars left, looks like it will survive the entire test on a single charge!

The 4GB microSD card in the box is a great choice – even here Nokia tried to one-up the E71’s 2GB card, and I cannot tell you anything about the cover or the rest of the accessories because I simply don’t have but the handset with me! Anyhow, a cover and hand strap are confirmed because the E72 is a pet worth protecting and keeping on a short leash.

Hope this covers most of what you are looking for. If not, I’m here to help. Let me know with your comments. Stay tuned for the multimedia review, tomorrow hopefully.


UPDATE: (22/9/2209) Downloading the newly released Ovi Store App solves all the freezing problems. The previous version was 1.05(271) clearly not working with the E72/E52 or N86, whereas the new one is 1.05(313) - it works smoothly, never hangs, just like on S60 5th edition devices. Scratch that con out!