[teabelly]

I'm totally fed up with my N86. I'm looking at getting an E series phone as my old E70 actually worked!  I was looking at the E5 or E72.... need decent battery life, good communications, decent camera and most of all RELIABILITY I don't want another garbage phone that resets itself the whole time and randomly deletes the email settings so you cannot send an email!!

I was all set to buy an E5 that I found as a refurb for just over a hundred quid but this forum seems to be full of complaints....

Older E72 or E5 or something else? I'm still under contract with the N86 so it has to be sim free and as cheap as possible!

Or do I just give up and get an iphone like everyone else?

[jimmyireland]

i would suggest the nokia E5

[thetao]

I think the biggest gripe about the E72 is the limited ram.  It shows itself when loading very complicated web pages, particularly site for TV stations, magazines, newspapers, etc. with lots of pictures and maybe embedded video.  The E5 has 256 MB of ram vs. 128 MB in the E72, so that's perhaps another vote for the E5.

I have an E73 (similar to E72), have never used an E72 or E5, and don't really have a "big picture" view of Nokia's phone portfolio.  With a few exceptions, the E73 works well for me, but then my requirements aren't too high.  I check one POP3 email account, don't currently use WiFi or VOIP, and am more technically inclined and more patient than many.

There is a general concensus that Nokia has let their S60 3rd Edition phone firmware suffer. The features are outdated, the firmware can be buggy and unstable, and updates come too slowly and are unsatisfying when they do appear.  Hopefully Nokia has caught up for their newest OS's (the Symbian^3 phones, which I know very little about?), but S60 3rd Ed. phones are likely never going to be cutting edge again.  The E71 (when it was new) was perhaps the best S60 3rd Ed. phone.

I won't dissuade you from getting a Nokia phone.  When I chose the E73, it was because I found more to hate about the competition (iPhone, Android, Windows Mobile, Blackberry) than Nokia.  But if you want a phone that's both high-tech and trouble free, you may want to also look at newer Nokia models.

Hope that helps.

[algotechie]

I'd suggest the iPhone. The E series phones are not meant for humans. The hardware is good but you cannot use it to its full potential. (It takes 26 key presses to get to change the wallpaper, for example. And I've not included the browsing for the image file. Of course you can create a shortcut to reach to some point but just how many can you create?) In other words, the software is no good and the phone won't respect your own settings or even data. It won't show you the caller's name or the number from which the caller made the call. It won't insert the recipients into the address field of the text. And so on. Nokia is good for basic phones only. They simply do not know smartphones.

[algotechie]

Woah what a coincidence I happened to come across the following two articles right after making my above post. The articles are current, and I think they will be of help make your decision:

http://www.pcworld.com/article/218244/why_android_is_now_beating_symbian_globally.html

http://www.pcworld.com/article/218104/head_to_head_iphone_vs_android.html

[teabelly]

Android looks quite good. HTC battery life hopeless tho. Might risk an E5 and return it if it's awful...

With my symbian I can change wallpaper from photo gallery...

[algotechie]

I meant, the setting itself is burried so deep. That was just an example. I'm talking about the E71. Okay, try changing the text message tone. It takes 14 key presses, and you cannot reach that setting from the logical place for it (Messaging) where you'd expect to find it somewhere under Options (and where all other brands put it too). Everything just feels like so out of place, out of reach, and compiled by the interns.

The gallery has its own problems in the E71. It pulls all the pictures from all over the phone into one big unorderly mess. And you have no control over what to import. You can't even remove a photo from the gallery even if it's just an icon used by an app. Same with the music and video files. Before buying an E-series model, have a look at its gallery if possible. The thing is pretty much useless.

[teabelly]

The messed up gallery doesn't sound much good.  A lot of the UI with symbian is backwards compared to other systems but if you're used to it then it isn't that bad. The E70 I had before was the same so I'm used to the E way of doing things but the N way can be better. Shame the reliability of N phones seems to be dismal. Does annoy me they both run symbian but you couldn't port contacts from an E to an N! Really dumb.

There's no real way of trying out any of these new phones to find out whether they're any good. Usually takes a couple of hours of use to find everything that is wrong with one.

[mccbleue]

The gallery isn't messed up at all, you've just been given a rather misleading interpretation of i, and in any case if you get the E5 or E72 you won't get the same set-up as in the E71 that the other user is describing.

The gallery of Symbian phones for the last couple of years has been database-driven, the purpose of this is to make things easy and accessible for those users who don't feel confident to navigate the phone's folder structures - if you select "all photos" you see do indeed see all images from all storage areas of the phone, normally presented in date order. You also have the ability to create albums so that you can organise your images as you see fit.

There is also no issue per se with copying contacts between Eseries and Nseries phones, I imagine that where you may have had issues before was with two phones one of which was a little old and one brand new, because there have been different variations on the "Phone sync" app which might not always be compatible. Sometimes the apps also work better pulling from nthe old phone using the new one rather than trying to send from the older one; if all else fails the Ovi Suite backup is much better anyway as you have the possibility to copy all data from one phone to another.

I was interested by the two articles linked above, one is the widely-reported article stating that more Android than Symbian units were sold in Q4 2010 (which is not a primarily Nokia market share issue, but one of manufacturers like SE and Samsung switching from Symbian to Android); the second article features a journalist complaining about all the troubles he has with his Android phone. The grass clearly isn't always greener on the other side of the fence...

[teabelly]

One was the E70 with the latest firmware and the recipient phone was the N86. They were some time apart but you'd think there would be some kind of compatibility mode...

Spotted a good deal on the N8 - free phone, £20 a month for 18 months so less than the PAYG price... having a decent flash appeals and the touchscreen does let you use predictive text in the old fashioned number pad kind of way.

Ovi suite is only any good if you aren't a mac owner. Nokia's mac support is pants. It's why I can't update the N86 as neither O2 can be bothered to release the update and I can't install it myself as I have a mac not a pc. Other manufacturers support macs and it would be trivial to let people download the firmware into the right location so the phone could update itself but apparently not. I usually use mac sync to sync via bluetooth which works seamlessly.

Does the N8 and E series phones have the gallery bug whereby if you delete photos then new ones aren't saved into the gallery? They just stay in the file system until you drop the battery off to reset the phone.

That's the worry with the N8. How do you reset the thing when it crashes?

[E5_fast_memory]

To algotechie "In other words, the software is no good and the phone won't respect your own settings or even data. It won't show you the caller's name or the number from which the caller made the call. It won't insert the recipients into the address field of the text. And so on."

Is that a joke or are you sectarian ? Any smartphone including Eseries will do all that. Symbian phones are doing well (touchscreen or not) but Nokia have announced they will move to their Android-like platform from 2012 (the N900 was a first round). All recent symbian phones have push mail and everything needed for professional use, multimedia and networking plus excellent maps and free gps with navi. Different brands have different styles and there are also people with different styles. iPhone used to be a forerunner but that's an old story. iPhone means sharing Apple's market vision: Apple store, iTunes, Apple devices "ecosystem"...quite unfriendly with hardware from other manufacturers. Regarding price vs benefits the obvious choice is to run from the iPhone. Simply put, everyone may have preferred brands and colours.

[mccbleue]

My N8 has had no gallery issues as you describe, and I've not seen it mentioned elsewhere. Ifthe phone should crash and become unresponsive, you hold the power key down for about 8 seconds until it vibrates three times, this shuts the phone down and you can then restart it. Never happened to me yet, though.

The Mac question is always a sticking point. Back in the days of the old Nokia Communicators, Nokia did produce a Mac version of the then PC Suite but  Apple objected to this, saying that they would handle all synchronisation with their computers via iSync. Had this not been the case, Mac users would probably be much better served today... However, with the N8 all you need is a good WLAN connection - updating over the air is quick and easy.

[algotechie]

@E5_fast_memory No it was not a joke. Have a look at the following threads, for example (I just searched a bit and posted the links; some might have been solved). Right now, my own set (an E71) does not show the caller's name in the call logs (which appears when you press the Call key when in the Home screen).

And when the cursor is in the "To" field while typing a text, and you press any keys, no contact suggestion list is displayed; you have to look up the recipient's number and insert it there.

Here's some of the threads with caller-name-not-displayed problem.

/t5/Eseries-and-Communicators/E66-Incoming-name-or-number-of-callers-not-displaying/m-p/409096#M3338...

/t5/Eseries-and-Communicators/E71-SUDDENLY-No-Caller-Name-Displays/m-p/719877#M71849

/t5/Eseries-and-Communicators/Name-of-caller-not-displaying/m-p/541251#M49189

/t5/Eseries-and-Communicators/E52-not-display-caller-name/m-p/682027#M67339

/t5/Eseries-and-Communicators/E71-Incoming-name-of-callers-not-displaying/m-p/394039#M31869

[jimmyireland]

none of these have anything to do with the E5

[algotechie]

Well, as I said, those were just picked in a quicky. If you include E5 in your search query, you get the same problem reported for that model too. For example, have a look at the following threads. (Again, these are picked up quickly and I've not even read them entirely.)

/t5/Eseries-and-Communicators/E5-Callers-Details-not-Showing/m-p/863451#M82257

/t5/Eseries-and-Communicators/e5-wont-show-who-is-calling-me/m-p/812091#M80338

[teabelly]

The none display of contacts is often due to not saving the number in the right format. Think mine had the same issue until I changed the numbers. Bit of a pain and it should be something that isn't necessary as there should be intelligent matching.

[thetao]

---

mccbleue wrote:

The gallery isn't messed up at all, you've just been given a rather misleading interpretation of i, and in any case if you get the E5 or E72 you won't get the same set-up as in the E71 that the other user is describing.

---

I'm sure the Gallery has improved since the E71, but it's still quirky in at least one way.  I just started a thread about this yesterday: /t5/Eseries-and-Communicators/Deleting-photos-from-Gallery/td-p/907931 .  Basically, I saved some pictures attached to an email to the phone memory, viewed them in the Gallery, and then deleted them with the File Manager.  But the image placeholders still remain in the Gallery, and I can't find a way to get them out.

Having said that, it appears to be an obscure bug, as I've since tried duplicating the problem...but for new images, the Gallery behaves as expected.  (If anybody knows a way to duplicate this problem, or knows of a fix, please reply to my other thread! )

[m1bnk]

I am IT manager, and we have many different phones issued by the company.

We have E5 and E63 mostly. Some blackberry, some HTC and a few iPhones. So here's my opinion for what it's worth

iPhone is very pretty, feels like quality, but the restrictions on use put in by Apple will soon annoy you, plus, for what it is, it's very expensive. E5 is utter garbage, E63 seems reliable so far but a bit basic in terms of modern smart-phones. HTC - early models feel cheap, later ones are excellent.

[sashaatallah]

i have nokia E72 for 1 year exactly, and it is very good phone, very practical, doesnt hang if u put for it compatible software , so go for nokia E72

[teabelly]

I'm going off the E5 rapidly! Found a cheap deal for the N8. Free phone and 20 quid a month for 18 months. Works out at costing the same as buying it sim free roughly. It's also in the top 10 for current phones on techrader so it can't be that flipping awful...

Nice to see that Mary Portas thinks it would be a good idea to have a phone shop where you can try out *actual* phones. Let's hope someone like CPW does it too. Dummy phones are infuriating!