Testing the Nokia E7 in the real world

One of the fun things I get to do every year at SXSW (which is over for another year) is taking a new smartphone with me, and trying it out not on the desk of a reviewer with a microscope and a remit to explore every nook and cranny of the device, but in the real world, in anger, in almost mission critical situations.

I’ll be honest, I do carry a spare device with a UK SIM card, but I rarely touch it – in act this year I think the only time the C6-01 was used was for the occasional picture of the unit being reviewed, and when someone who had set up an interview with me only had my UK number.

This year, after a few years of the mid an low range devices, I managed to convince Rafe to give me a high end device – the dual form factor Nokia E7, which runs as a portrait slab device, or a landscape Qwerty keyboard enterprise device.

There’s a five part video diary series (part one, part two, part three, part four and the final part five), finishing with a text write up on the E7 can be found over on All About Symbian:

If you’ve been following my series of video diaries, then you’ll have a fair idea what I think of the E7, but let’s go back to before I picked up the E7 for the trip. I’ve been using Nokia Communicators since the pre-Symbian days via the GeOS powered Nokia 9000i – and moved up the production line, using the devices heavily until the 9300i. After that it went a bit askew. The E90 was nice, but it never really clicked with me, I was more than happy with the Nokia N95 and having everything in the smaller PDA/phone form.

With the arrival of the N97, again I wasn’t that bothered. Steve was all over the device (once stable firmware appeared), but I was happy with first the E75 (arguably a mini-communicator with the slide out keyboard and E series software load-out) and then the X6. The N97 mini didn’t do enough to keep me either. And not because of any technical issues, limitations or other stick you can use to beat those devices – they simply didn’t work for me.

So with plans made for the E7 to be the “device of the video diary from SXSW in 2011”, I was looking forward to the challenge, to using a platform that had missed the mark for me in the recent past, and to see if the E7 was simply a polished N97 using Symbian^3.

As it turned out, the E7 has rekindled the passion I felt with the 9300i.

Yes there are compromises in the device, and that’s true of any smartphone, but this is probably the best balance for what I need from a smartphone / PDA / ultra portable computer.