NOKIA E5 Pro Reviews

The Nokia E5 is a solid, affordable messaging smartphone, but it feels increasingly obsolete as we head into 2011.

The E5 is a sturdy messaging phone that offers plenty of features and has an excellent keyboard and good battery life. However, its cramped screen is a bit of a let down and the Series 60 operating system looks quite dated now compared to the competition. Given that there are plenty of great smartphones you can get for around £180 on Pay As You Go these days, we don’t think the E5 offers quite enough thrills to make it a tempting a proposition.

The Nokia E5 is a well built handset with a good quality keyboard. It is well suited to those who do a lot of mobile email or texting. But the small screen is not so good if mobile web browsing is more your cup of tea.

With all said and done, do remember that the E5 is setting itself up as an affordable alternative, albeit bulkier, to the visually appealing E72. In doing so, the E5's lower price point at S$398 is an apt choice for heavy text messengers with a limited budget.

It has no touchscreen, no flashy operating system and no particularly exciting apps, but the Nokia E5 smartphone is a solid, reliable and affordable business phone with impressive build quality.

We would be happy to recommend the Nokia E5. With a slightly more lackluster finish at a more appealing price-tag than its E72 sibling, and most other similarly classed phones, it certainly does the key things it needs to do pretty well. The slightly unrefined finish of the Nokia E5 does crop up from time to time, with the screen resolution, cramped keypad and awkward volume-rocker occasionally hindering use. The interface could also use a revamp as it's been looking dated for a while now. That said, for considerably less than a BlackBerry, the Nokia E5 offers a good feature-set at a decent price. QWERTY alternatives to the Nokia E5 with similar specs would be the considerably more expensive BlackBerry Bold 9700, or the Android-powered Motorola Milestone 2, the latter of which has a much larger keyboard layout. If your sights are set on something at a similar price-point, another QWERTY device to consider would be the Xperia X10 mini pro, with less of a business orientation, but the versatility of Android nonetheless.

The Nokia E5 is not a great looking handset, and it certainly doesn't have the wow factor that the E72 has in our eyes. And with a largely plastic chassis, bolstered by a metal backplate, it might not be all that robust. But what goes on inside is mostly good stuff. We do wish there were a way of Nokia getting a larger screen into play, though. Even by squeezing the central button bar to get us another centimetre of height would be welcome. Overall, though, it will be the clever dual home screen system that sells this smartphone to people wanting a phone for business and for their home life, and for around £250 it just about justifies its price tag.