Foreword

Even those who really hate the Finnish guys can agree that the Eseries smartphones are almost always great handsets, this being the main reason for Symbian Series 60 becoming a good alternative for any other current platform in the business life. Of course another important cause of the success is that the renown manufacturer is doing a great job with putting his own operating system in the hands of average consumers in an invisible and very smart way, under almost any kind of name. To tell the truth I’m happy about this, but I have many non-professional acquaintances who had a hard time with switching from Series 40 to Series 60.

Anyway, there is no scam in the Eseries, everyone gets what is expected: an elegant smartphone that looks good and has lots of features, this being accompanied with additional business applications. One can recognize these handsets by their design, but it’s a fact that there are quite a lot of similar handsets: it would be a mistake to think that the reason is that Nokia sells the same thing many times in a different package, since the truth is that they have laid down the basics many years ago, and the new handsets – besides bringing about new features – stick to the customs. The subject of our review, Nokia E52, is the direct successor of the highly acclaimed E51, and the twin of E55, the only difference being the keypad – and of course they don’t have the same price.

The handset came from XXL GSM; the box is low-keyed, it only has a charger, a data cable, a charger converter (microUSB-slim Nokia connector), a 3.5 mm headset and a 1 GB microSD card inside besides the phone itself.

Exterior

I can’t keep it to myself, I just have to start with this: E52 is beautiful, stunning and spectacular at the same time. But it really is, I haven’t seen such a good-looking handset in months, Nokia’s new device looks like a business handset, or even more, like a phone has to look like. It has the perfect size (116 x 49 x 9.9 mm), it weighs 98 grams, which is no too heavy and not too light. The materials used are flawless: there are lots of brushed and milled metal parts, it’s really good to take into the hand, which is of course also due to the great assembly quality.

One of the weakest spots of E51 has been the display, which has a diagonal of only 2”: this has been fixed in E52. the new handset has a 2.4” screen (that’s a 1 cm bonus), its other properties (QVGA resolution, TFT technology) being the same. I think this size is ideal for a phone with such a design. The keypad has changed a lot as well, the main controls are not so small any more, like they were on the predecessor, every key has an appropriate size and quality. This is even more true for the numeric part – as you might know, E55 has 20 keys where this one has only 12; this shows perfectly how large and easy to use are the numeric keys.

The back panel is also impressive, the center, milled part can be taken off, the camera is on top, accompanied with a LED flash and the handsfree speaker.

There is a lonely microphone sitting on the bottom of the phone, but on the right side there is quite a lot of stuff, as besides the camera’s shoot key (which has a rather strange place – in the middle) we can find three other button a bit higher, the top and bottom of these being the volume controls, and the center one is used for launching voice commands.

On top we can see the 3.5 mm jack and the power button, while on the left there is the microUSB connector that can be used for charging as well.

Hardware, operating system, software

The handset has the third generation Symbian Series 60 platform with Feature Pack 2 that we’ve seen on E55 and some other previous Nokia handsets as well. Additionally we also have Home Screen 1.0 installed, which is in fact a mode changing feature, something that is much different than profile changing: with this we can change the menu layout, the wallpaper and everything else by changing between business and private modes. The CPU is a 600 MHz ARM11 chip that was launched on 5630; this gives an incredible kick for the phone – the only exception being the bit sluggish image viewer, this could be a bit faster.

E55 had stability issues and even hung up a couple of times, these have disappeared on E52, it surely has a newer software version – this also means that the very annoying issues have disappeared from E55 as well, thus creating a totally different impression of the handset. The software is basically the same thing on the two phone, so I won’t write pages about the features, if you’re interested go ahead and check out our E55 review.

The phone comes with a memory card, which will be rather useful, as there is only 55.7 MB of free space on the onboard memory. Otherwise the ROM size is no public, but it is probably a 64 MB module, as there are tons of programs. Under the Office menu we’ll find a dictionary, an intranet client, QuickOffice suite (and it cannot only open, but also edit and create standard Office documents), a unit- and currency-converter, text magnifier (this can be used for zooming in/out of all texts on the phone from 50 to 140 percent), a basic calculator, a PDF reader, a Zip packer, notepad and the Active Notes feature – this can be used for putting all kinds of information into a note, ranging from images to sound clips and contact list information.

We can find GPS-related software in the Applications menu, which includes Nokia Maps 3.0, the voice navigation being available for use only after paying a separate fee. Besides these there is a search tool, a message reader, Files on Ovi and the world clock/weather forecast combo called Traveler. The sound recorder is again placed in the Multimedia menu.

Phone calls, messaging, internet

I can’t say anything new about features related to phone calls to those who have already seen a Symbian phone. The contact list practically has unlimited storage space and there are as many extra fields as we want, since we can create our own labels. The call log can display calls together or separately, but it’s more important that the phone, as opposed to E55, performs good during calls: I have heard the other person clearly and they didn’t complain either, although they have also added that this is not the best.

In terms of messaging we have everything we’d need. SMS, MMS, e-mail with authenticated IMAP server support and attachments are all supported. It’s important to note that the phone has Nokia Messaging by default, which lets us receive HTML emails and it’s easier to set up e-mail accounts at popular providers.

E52 has nothing to be ashamed of on the field of data transfer, as it has quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) and all kinds of other treats. We can use GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, 10.2 Mbps HSDPA and 2 Mbps HSUPA for transferring data on the mobile network, but of course we can also stick to WiFi and Bluetooth 2.0. The web browser is still a great one, and although the 2.4” display is not the most comfortable, but it’s good enough.

It’s important to note that we can use the phone as a modem when connected to the computer, which can come in handy for businessmen on the road.

Multimedia

The camera has a resolution of 3.2 megapixels, fixed focus and there is a LED flash. The highest available resolution for images is 2048 x 1536 pixels, while videos can be recorded at 640 x 480 pixels at a speed of 25 frames/second. Since it’s a business phone, the camera doesn’t have many settings, practically we can only tamper with some preset modes. This includes a customizable one as well, here we can set flash functionality (there is a red-eye reduction setting), white balance, exposure correction (+/-2 EV in steps of 0.3), color tones, sensitivity (low, medium and high ISO), sharpness and contrast. The preset modes are the following ones: portrait, landscape, sport, night, night portrait. As a bonus we can make panorama photos too; this works automatically, but it’s rather unreliable.

Image quality is average, there is no problem with the focus point (as there has been on E55), but there are some other issues. The manufacturer tried to compensate the high noise level with powerful noise reduction, and this, together with the weak edge sharpness, results in very “digital” photos. The handset tends to overexpose the photos, images taken with the flash are incredibly noisy, the videos are average – you can have a look at this by clicking here.

As for music, the handset has everything you can see on any other Series 60 phone: a good music player, which filters nicely by ID3 tags, can run in the background, has an equalizer, but it doesn’t always display album covers, and I have no idea why does it do that. Thanks to the standard headphone jack we can quickly turn the phone into a musical one, and we will need to do some investments, as the asymmetric HS-83 headset in the package is not a champion of quality, but it is still usable – I’d like to note that for some reason it works properly only with Nokia phones, it has a terrible sound quality on an iPod. E52 has a clear sound on the handsfree speaker, although we can forget the bass. As an extra we have an FM radio as well.

Other, summary

We won’t have much to play with: the phone is theoretically compatible with N-Gage (the hardware surely supports it), but I haven’t found any sings of it on the phone, so I couldn’t play any games on the test phone.

The 1,500 mAh lithium battery performed great, it kept E52 alive for three days with no problem and it didn’t even die even by the end of the third day. A business handset does indeed need some power, as there are some potential users who will be talking all day long.

Nokia E52 is a worthy successor of E51. It has fixed its greatest defects (small display and small controls) and it also kept all of its positive aspects, including the great design, and I say it has improved that as well, it is really beautiful and a high-quality handset. It doesn’t have a very shocking price, we can get it for about 280 euros, and I think that’s clearly worth it for this quality and feature set. I say it bests E55 (which even costs ~60 euros more), I don’t even see why should one pay more for the half-QWERTY keyboard. This means I still don’t recommend that one, but E52 gets the award!

Nokia E52

Bocha

Translated by Szaszati

Nokia E52 has been provided by XXL GSM. The handset can be purchased at:
Budapest VI. Jókai tér 6.
Budapest VI. Teréz körút 18.
On-line at www.xxlgsm.hu.

Specifications

Nokia E52
	General
	Technology	GSM, UMTS
	Size	116 x 49 x 9.9 mm
	Weight	96 grams
	Available colors	Metallic silver aluminum, Gold aluminum, Graphite grey
	Display
	Display diagonal	2.4”
	Display resolution	240 x 320 pixels
	Display type	TFT
	Number of colors	16.7 million
	Memory
	Phonebook capacity	dynamic
	SMS memory / max. MMS size	dynamic / 300KB
	Internal memory	55.7 MB
	Memory expandability	microSD (in package: 1 GB)
	Data transfer
	Frequency bands	850/900/1800/1900 MHz
	GPRS / EDGE	Class 10 (4+1/3+2) / Class 10 (236.8 kbps)
	UMTS / HSDPA / HSUPA	yes (384 kbps) / yes (10.2 Mbps) / yes (2 Mbps)
	IrDA / Bluetooth	yes / 2.0 (A2DP too)
	WiFi	yes
	USB	microUSB 2.0
	Push-to-talk / RSS	yes / yes
	GPS receiver	yes
	Basic functions
	Profiles	yes
	Vibra function	yes
	Built-in handsfree	yes
	Voice dialing / voice commands	yes / yes
	Sound recorder	yes
	Alarm clock	yes, also when turned off
	Predictive text entry	T9
	Software
	Platform	Symbian OS 9.2 Series 60 v3.2, Home Screen 1.0
	WAP / HTML browser	yes / yes
	E-mail client	yes (POP3, IMAP4, Exchange, authenticated)
	Java	yes, MIDP 2.0
	Games	none by default
	Currency converter	yes
	Extra software	QuickOffice, Adobe PDF, Zip, Nokia Maps 3.0
	Multimedia
	Main camera	3.2 megapixels, fixed focus, flash
	Secondary camera	yes, VGA resolution
	Video recording	yes (VGA resolution, 25 fps)
	Music player	yes, can run in background
	Equalizer	yes
	FM radio	yes - RDS
	Battery
	Main battery	1500 mAh Li-Ion
	Standby time	672 hours /432 hours (2G/3G)
	Talk time	8 hours / 6 hours (2G/3G)
	Music playback time	18 hours
	Other
	gyroscope