Nokia’s Eseries has always been the Finnish manufacturer’s business-oriented range, and the E52 is no different, packed to the rafters with impressive features.

However, the E52 comes with a difference: it’s super slim, light and looks as smart as it actually is.

Nokia certainly hasn’t scrimped on the design of the E52. The pocketable device measures 49x9.9x116mm, and weighs a paltry 98g, including the full metal backplate.

The screen is about average for a candybar smartphone at 2.4-inches (240x320 pixels). It seems a lot smaller than the BlackBerry Bold’s, which is only 0.2-inches larger, however the E52’s is still clear for basic operations.

The in-built accelerometer changes the orientation of the display when you turn the E52 onto its side. This is a very useful addition for browsing, unless you actually want to type a search term or URL but not at all easy to use for more complicated functions such as typing an email because the keys are the wrong way round.

Seen the light

An ambient light sensor is positioned on the top left side, just above the screen. The purpose of this feature is to sense the light wherever you are and adjust the screen brightness accordingly. Although we didn’t see any spectacular change, it did make the screen slightly easier to see in bright conditions.

One feature of the Nokia E52 is its dual screen functionality. You can switch between fully customisable personal and business homescreens to access your most used applications as quickly as possible. It’s easy enough to toggle between the two, simply by clicking on the icon situated on both homescreens, but it’s also easy to forget you’ve switched between the two.

The E52 includes a complicated key layout, which is never a good thing. The two customisable shortcut keys to either side of the navigation button (preset and marked as home and calendar on left hand button, message and back/delete on the right hand button) are too easy to press by mistake. Indeed, we often found ourselves launching the messaging function rather than heading backwards through the menus.

Butter fingers

The customisable soft keys and call answer/end are also a little hit and miss – they’re recessed against the shortcut keys and if you have anything more than dainty pianist’s digits, you could easily launch an app rather than answer a call.

However, the numeric keyboard, is responsive and the buttons give a satisfying click to confirm when you’ve pressed a button, although it’s a little out of the ordinary to have a T9 keyboard rather than QWERTY on a smartphone at the moment – almost every device has either a virtual or hardware QWERTY keyboard. However, keys are made harder to use because the lighter grey of the number markings struggles to stand out against the darker silver background.

The email app is a little antiquated, which is something you’d expect from an OS that hasn’t seen a large update like rival smartphone operating systems out there. It’s a little disappointing, but fine if you just need a business phone to make and take calls, check the odd email and view documents – bearing in mind that for the latter, you’ll have to zoom in to see the text clearly.

A 1GB card is provided but the phone supports cards up to 16GB in size to bolster that pretty paltry 60MB of internal memory.

Just browsing

The Nokia E52 is an HSDPA-enabled handset boasting download speeds of up to 10.2Mbps, although this is network dependent. On O2 (which supports 7.2Mbps download), speeds were satisfying enough for browsing simple sites, using the less-than-stunning Nokia browser. We’d recommend installing Opera if you want to surf the net with ease.

Preinstalled apps, as you’d expect from a Symbian S60 device, include QuickOffice for creating Word, Excel and PowerPoint presentations, and a PDF reader. These are best for viewing documents rather than writing them, as it can become a little awkward on the T9 keypad rather than a QWERTY keyboard.

When in personal mode, there are a number of features that have the potential to make you spend more time there than in business mode. First, there’s full N-Gage support if you’re into gaming. There’s also a 3.5mm headphone jack, meaning you can scrap the sub-standard Nokia headset and plug in your own.

Nokia E52 runs on Symbian 9.3 OS with the Series 60 3rd Edition user interface, with a 600 MHz CPU – something that should eradicate that time lag. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem to make a whole lot of difference as the OS seems sluggish and clunky, especially when switching homescreens and opening applications.

Battery life is a big bonus. Unlike other smartphones where you’d blink and the battery life would be diminished, the Nokia E52’s battery was still full after using it for 24 hours. We may not have made an enormous number of calls, or activated push email, but on other devices in the same situation, battery life would have been squeezed out to at least half life. The 1500 mAh battery was definitely a good choice here.

The E52 is the best-looking, most pocketable Nokia smartphone yet. Although there are a fair number of quirks, these are mostly down to the seemingly antiquated Symbian OS.

A major update is certainly needed soon to keep up with competitors – especially when Windows 6.5 begins its roll out.

Author: Clare Hopping

Nokia E52 smartphone review