Mobile Info Planet

As I mentioned in my previous post I am interested in the new Nokia E72.
Well yesterday I had the chance to play around with it for a good 20-25 min, and here are my first impressions.

Follow up:

+ Form factor: the size is ideal, and quite light given all the features it packs.

+ keyboard: very good QWERTY keyboard, with excellent feel and perfect key distribution. And the dedicated keys for '?!,.' are just awesome for texting. In all, one of the best keyboards I have used.

+ Build quality: it seemed quite solid in the hand, and I didn't notice any squeaking when pressing the sides and the back.

The negatives:

- Build quality (yes, again): there is a visible gap of around 2 mm between the top of the menu keys and the display. I had also noticed it in some pictures that I had seen on the web.
My concern is that dust will penetrate under the display through that gap, but then again (and hopefully) it might be a non-issue.

- Speed: the biggest surprise, and disappointment, of them all.
All the previews and reviews I had read so far state that it is noticeably faster than its predecessor. But not only was it not any faster, it was actually slower than the E71 (there was an E71 right next to it that I compared it to). The E71 has a 369 MHz CPU while the E72 runs at 600 Mhz. But the device I tried felt as if it were running at 200 Mhz, or as if the firmware were in debug mode: there was a half-a-second pause after each menu keypress, or launching the apps assigned to the dedicated app keys. The E71 next to it, on the other hand, was instantaneous in those same operations. Overall the E72 felt rather unresponsive.

- Animations: by themselves they are not a problem, but the animated fade-ins/outs of S60's FP2 just added to the overall sensation of slowness in this particular case.

To sum it up, it could be an excellent device, but the overall lack of speed prevents me from buying one right now. And I say "right now" as I hope that the unresponsiveness is a firmware issue that will be fixed through an upgrade that is sure to come. And speaking of fixes, I found a small bug: when you multitask by opening the list of open apps, the first app that you get in that list, and that is selected, is the app that is currently running instead of the app you were running previously, as it has been in all my Nokia phones so far (and the E71 sitting next to it).

So when, and if, there is a fix for the overall performance I most likely will get an E72.
But not before then.