As I’m working on a long and detailed article about Psion and Symbian (similar in setup to the Palm article), I need to dive into a number of devices that I have never personally owned. One of the devices that was atop my list was what I think is the ultimate Symbian device: the Nokia E7 – the last of the long line of Communicators, released in early 2011. While more detailed information about it will find its way into the Psion/Symbian article, I figured it’d be interesting to give a few first impressions.
The Nokia E7 was one of the first Nokia phones to sport the ‘Lumia’ shape the company still uses today, but unlike the similarly-shaped N8 that came before it, it sported a landscape QWERTY keyboard, hidden behind what is by far the best spring mechanism I’ve ever seen – it opens and closes with an incredibly solid, satisfying, and firm spring motion. The keyboard itself is a joy to type on.
The E7 is built almost entirely out of anodised aluminium, and is remarkably thin for a device that houses a full landscape keyboard. It’s got a nice 4.0″ 640×360 Clearblack AMOLED display, which, while outdated, still looks pretty damn good. It’s a capacitive touchscreen, and responds well to touches and swipes. The distance between the glass surface and the actual pixels is fairly large, though.
All in all, the E7 feels like an incredibly solid piece of engineering, and there’s no flex or bending anywhere on this device – remarkable for a hinged device. It’s so sad that devices like this aren’t made anymore, because I would drop every phone I have if Nokia released a new, modern variant of the E7. With today’s technologies it’d be even thinner and stronger, although I don’t think Windows Phone would be the right software for such a device (should be Android). I never liked touchscreen typing, so the full QWERTY keyboard is very, very welcome.
As for the software.
Oh, Symbian.
The grand dame of the smartphone operating systems, with a heritage that dates back to the early ’80s at Psion. The E7 runs Symbian Belle (Symbian version 10.1; it originally came with Symbian^3 Anna, which is version 9.5), which is entirely touch-optimised, and indeed, is actually very easy to use with touch. Response is excellent – especially taking into account it has a single-core 680Mhz processor – and animations, swiping, and scrolling are all relatively painless.
Symbian is a bit of a kitchen sink operating system, and there’s actually a whole bunch of cool stuff it can do. It supports USB-OTG, so I’ve already been using it with a mouse and keyboard; it supports mass storage as well, like a USB HDD. It also has an HDMI-out, so I’ve also been playing with Symbian on my 43″ TV. Deep down, Symbian also shows its business-focus, with loads of features I don’t understand but which are clearly for enterprise users.
Application-wise, there’s something for everything, but quality is often lacking, and applications that are and native, and integrate visually are rare. Multitasking is a given on Symbian, and works reasonably well – however, the task switcher is often flaky and unresponsive. As a bonus, it comes with a very recent version of mobile Microsoft Office.
As a crucial part of the research for the Psion/Symbian article, the E7 will be my main phone for a few weeks, starting today. Since my last Symbian experience was with the Nokia E71 in 2008, any recommendations for applications and the like are welcome.
Oh, the things I do for OSNews.
There exists a successor of the E7, the N950 running MeeGo. That’s the second device after the N9. It was ready together with the N9 to hit market but unlike the N9 was prevented to even go to that small number of markets the N9 was allowed to enter. Elop. You can find them on eBay for >$2000 (more then x4 of the original prices, the last of its kind, the last real Nokia and Nokia Communicator, A-class).
Edited 2013-04-12 23:14 UTC
I’m so sick of everybody blaming Elop when Nokia was badly managed for so long it wasn’t funny. What did you want him to do, close the doors and give the money back to the shareholders?
When you compare that MeeGo to Android 2.x and Apple iOS 3 (which is what its competition would be at the time) I’m sorry but its just not in the same league, it needed a LOT more polish and a lot more better written native apps that just didn’t exist.
So what did that leave? Symbian which if you read TFA you can see why that wouldn’t work, jumping into the race to the bottom that was Android, they didn’t have the money to buy WebOS (which IMHO would have been the best choice) and of course Apple wasn’t about to license iOS so that left windows. Did it turn out to be a bad call? yep but honestly I don’t see any other call he could make, it was late in the game and they were waaay far behind so going windows was a long shot but frankly they really didn’t have much of a choice.
Maybe the guy that worked at Nokia and chimed in last time there was a Nokia story could chime in again and talk about all the backstabbing and serious issues they were having with their OSes, as I have a feeling a lot of Linux fans get rose colored glasses when talking about MeeGo and don’t realize how much of a mess it was over there. From what I’ve read from guys that were there it actually reminds me a LOT of Apple right before Jobs return, in that you have a lot of talent being poached internally, lots of feature creep, and lots of backstabbing, kinda like what Apple saw trying to make Copeland.
I mean when they called in Elop they had no less than THREE internal OSes scraping for resources, you had Symbian, MeeGo, and the Java based one I can’t even think of the name of offhand and none of them equal to much less better than Android 2.x and iOS 3. How can anyone expect them to make a great OS internally with that much struggle going on inside?
I take it you speak from personal experience? I haven’t had a Meego device in my hands, so if you can, please elaborate on what specific problems you encountered.
I own an N9, and felt it had both strengths and weaknesses compared to Android 2.3. It certainly looked slicker, and I appreciated the integrated services. All kinds of IM protocols were supported by the same app that was used for SMS (it uses Telepathy and can be extended with plugins). Phoning with Skype and Google was supported through the phone app. No need for an app for this and that and for every little feature. It’s a useful device on its own.
However, the browser is shit, and the development pace of Android has been ridiculous since then, so there aren’t many things I miss when using my Nexus 4. The feel of a solid Nokia in my hand, of course, and the soft keyboard, which pops up Ctrl and Esc keys when used in a terminal. Oh, and the sound quality.
I understand your point, its kind of fair. You can’t really blame elop for their colossal delay in turning the internet tablets n700 & n800 into phones. Would any one in the states have chose a nokia Mameo/Meego phone over a Android/IOS one? I don’t know, but no one in their right minds is choosing a Windows phone 8 nokia over a Mameo/Meego phone.
If you look at the alternative phone os market, you have jolla, BlackBerry, Ubuntu all using a variation of the qt strategy that Elop abandoned. I don’t think he got the point of it. I do think that Symbian lived far longer than it should have do to internal pressure to keep it which starved off resources for Mameo/Meego. The Jerks. I never got to use Meego, but Mameo was decent.
I wanted what it appears most of the investors wanted: Add Android as a middle tier between low-end Symbian and high-end Meego, with a Qt runtime as a Nokia Android value add (so all 3 phones could run Qt apps and reward all those Qt developers who stubbornly stuck with Nokia).
Then hold a “Symbian Forever” ( http://apple2history.org/history/ah08/#05 ) event to keep the Symbian fans enthused and using Nokia products until the Android and Meego phones were shipping in volume.
Going forward, move Meego to the same Linux kernel as Android to minimize costs, and add Android tablets and Meego tablets and laptops to the product line as sales expanded. (If this sounds vaguely familiar, google Ubuntu…)
That rapid drop in Nokia stock after February 11, 2011 was not caused by investors dropping their wallets to applaud, but by investors dropping their jaws and then shares in stunned disbelief.
Sorry, Meego was already lost to most Maemo developers, because Maemo was based on GTK+. We were promised that our GTK+ based API would stay and all would be well, but they we were sold out to Qt. So, really, I’m not sure who all the supposed Meego Qt supporters were?! Nokia successfully mismanaged Maemo/Meego in tot he ground a long, long time before Elop arrived.
Agree to the extent that the GTK+ API changed enough between the 770, 800, and 900 releases to require porting apps, resulting in an actual shrinking repository going forward. Frustrating and unnecessary from both developer and user perspectives.
But my sense from the mailing lists was that the move to Qt had significant acceptance in the developer community, since it was a far superior API and promised the stability that Maemo’s API had lacked. If you were more deeply involved in the community, though, you may be seeing a quiet revolt that wasn’t visible on the lists.
If so, then the move to WP 7 just exacerbated the pain – a totally new kernel and toolset, then another huge disconnect getting to WP 8 with yet another new kernel and API changes and abandoned devices. Out of the frying pan, into the fire.
In any event, my point was that the market clearly expected a strategy that openly wooed Symbian users with a clear upgrade path to a new Android-based line, rather than Mr. Elop’s approach of effectively killing Symbian and the highly regarded Qt almost a year before the first of the new phones could ship. He who didn’t know or care about the history of Osborne has now repeated it. *sigh*
Exactly. They lost a significant amount of developers at each revision… for no particularly good reason. The API/ABI was never very stable between any major release.
I think that was possibly the minority of developers still invested in the system. They lost a heck of a lot of us with the N810/N900 transition when they dropped support for the N810. This was for the same unexplainable reasons. We realise now, it was part of the Nokia culture, but at the time it just seemed suicidal.
Except, the tools weren’t tied to Linux, which was always a sticking point for previous incarnations of Maemo. I skipped Qt, but I assume they still had a convoluted build system, having looked at how Sailfish works.
I think he saved an awful lot of money doing that though. In that time, they weren’t burning through capital trying to support dead platforms. At least that much made a little sense. The timing, I agree, was bad.
Thanks because THAT is the kind of stuff I was talking about! When Elop got there the place was already a mess, MANY bridges had been burned, and the OSes they had just couldn’t compete with what was out and the time, certainly not without the third party devs which as you pointed out found out they were wasting their time and moved on.
Now did I think WinPhone was a good call? Nope, if it were my call I’d have tried to get my hands on WebOS but for all we know he may have made a call to HP and been told to get lost. And for those saying “Android!” how many companies are making money on Android now? Samsung and…yeah pretty much Samsung, even HTC has posted some losses, why?
Because Android has a fatal flaw in that anybody can put out android devices so you WILL have a race to the bottom,there is no way for Google to avoid it. Look at how many unauthorized Android devices you can find now at every B&M on the planet, most customers won’t know the difference between Nokia hardware and that cheapo Chinese crud hardware, all they will know is the Nokia is 3 times the price of the unit next to it so they’ll pass on the Nokia.
If you want to blame somebody? The answer is simple, its the same answer as HP, MSFT, and AMD, its the board that let the mess go on for far too long before trying to do something about it. Like it or not Nokia was in VERY bad shape by the time they brought Elop in, they let the whole Meego/Maemo thing go on too long and as you pointed out run off the Maemo devs while they were at it, they let Symbian get way behind the times, they simply didn’t manage the business well and when you are talking about a business as cutthroat as mobile just slacking off like that is deadly.
Race to the bottom? And that’s different from Nokia at the moment, how, exactly? A few thoughts.
1) Nokia is putting out ever cheaper Windows Phone devices. They ARE racing to the bottom – without much success.
2) Flagship Android devices are expensive, and do not take part in this race to the bottom at all.
3) Nokia is trying to peddle an OS few people seem to want. Having higher prices – as you seem to think is a good idea – is idiotic in this scenario.
Had Nokia put stock Android on their Lumias, they’d be king right now. Former Symbian users in traditional Nokia hinterlands aren’t flocking to Windows Phone – they’re all flocking to Android. The strong Nokia name with the popular Android operating system would have been THE route to success.
And they should have seen this coming the moment Android first gained traction. They did not, and now they’re doomed. The smartphone branch will eventually be sold – most likely to Microsoft. Mark my words. I give it five years, tops.
I’ll one up that, three years tops.
Look up the numbers Thom, there is A REASON why Android is outselling Apple like 30 to 1 yet Apple is making a ton more money than all of the Android companies combined, its because they are in a death spiral straight to the bottom. Sure there are high end Android devices…what are the sales figures on those? Probably not very good.
Again its human nature, you see 2 devices side by side, both running the same OS, both the same size, only one is a third of the price of the other? For every one you sell of the higher priced you’ll see 20 of the lower. Its the same thing we saw in X86 which is why Dell and HP make on average a lousy $8 on some of their biggest sellers, because at the end of the day “good enough and cheap” trumps “great and expensive” by one hell of an amount.
And did I say the Windows call worked? Nope in fact i said its pretty obvious that it didn’t, I merely pointed out he was brought on after they had been mismanaged for ages and there really wasn’t a good call to be made. And what makes you think a Nokia Android would sell for squat anyway? Samsung and HTC already had a BIG headstart and frankly could have done (and do) Android better than Nokia, there really wasn’t anything Nokia could do in that arena that Samsung and HTC couldn’t do better, especially Samsung with their R&D.
Again if it were me and there would have been a chance in hell of getting WebOS I would have went that route over WinPhone, WebOS was nice, modern, easy to port software to, its just a nice OS. But you predict Nokia dead in 5? that may be true but I predict Android will be in the same boat X86 is now in 3, with Chinese crud dropping the bottom out so only the most cheapest devices with razor thin margins have a chance. Oh you’ll still have one or two high end models, just as X86 as Alienware and Falcon but just like Alienware and Falcon the niche will be so small as to be not worth counting, its gonna be a plummet to the bottom for Android.
in fact I would be surprised if we didn’t have dual core Android tablets and phones for $100 by Xmas, maybe even as low as $50. At those prices “good enough and cheap” will pretty much gut a lot of the midrange Android gear, probably will see a lot of the high end flop as well.
S40 (which isn’t really Java-based – it’s better to say that it supports 3rd party apps via j2me). But there’s also S30 (for really low-end handsets).
BTW, not only there was lots of infighting, the resources were simply wasted – only 3 years or so ago, the Symbian division alone had bigger budget than the entire R&D of Apple …with meagre results.
You might be also interested in http://www.mobile-review.com/review/nokia-n9-2-en.shtml (at the very least its Conclusions)
But be careful when speaking here against the Meego kitten that was killed…
Get LJP to emulate all kinds of old consoles, lonely cat media player for all video formats support, n-gage compatibillity layer for playing all those great games like pandemonium, need for speed and CoD.
Opera for webbrowsing, skype for.. well skype.
I would rather have a S60v3 phone with a modern screen today than anything with android, iOS or windows on it. That being said i still would prefer a Palm Treo 6** or 7** with PalmOS Garnet any day over anything symbian.
Only last week did I upgrade an E7 to Symbian Belle, hoping it would solve the owner’s complaints of calls getting dropped.
The E7 is big, heavy and slow. It reminds of a phone from last decade.
You know, apart from trading mobile-optimized but touchscreen-unfriendly OSs for touchscreen-friendly resource hogs, I fail to see what has changed in a decade.
We still make phones that are big (in the sense of being hard to fit in a crowded pocket) and heavy. They can perform faster, but only when the underlying hardware is itself significantly faster than anything Symbian ever ran on. And even if Li-ion technology must be slowly improving, phone battery life has only got much worse, partly because of a larger screen area/battery capacity ratio and partly because modern mobile OSs suck at saving power.
It seems to me that in their quest to make the ultimate 4″ laptop replacement, phone manufacturers increasingly forget the primary purpose of a phone as a communication device, instead creating some weird hybrid device for Internet junkies that’s neither capable enough to replace a full computer (that would be tablets), nor very good at being a phone.
Edited 2013-04-13 06:29 UTC
I think the increasingly bigger screens are part of the tech spec race.
All too often phones are compared and one is judged better over the other because some spec is better. A phone with a bigger screen is better than a phone with a smaller one.
The iPhone 5 has a bigger screen than the iPhone 4S, but physically it isn’t that much bigger and you’re still able to control is using one hand and your thumb.
Other manufactures are making their phones so big that even styluses are making a comeback and you need two hands to use it and look silly when making a call.
Maybe it would make sense to have a smaller phone, that wirelessly synchs all your contacts, ToDo and agenda data, but does very little else. It would have great battery life, let’s say at least a week. For all the other stuff you carry a tablet that can use the phone’s 3/4G connection to go on-line.
A tablet is much more convenient to do “serious” stuff and this way it keeps the phone small and off the charger.
So, if I understand correctly, what you propose is to build better feature phones, that treat sync, tethering and new communication media like Facebook and Twitter as first-class use cases. Meanwhile, more advanced tasks like web browsing or media editing would be left to larger devices like tablets which can handle them better. Is that right?
I think I like this idea. Not sure if phone manufacturers and operators would like it so much though, as it destroys the potential income source of selling two separate high-end devices and data plans.
Edited 2013-04-13 07:37 UTC
I guess most people won’t go for it, but it might be appealing for business people or people that call a lot.
Most smart (if not all) phones aren’t that good at making calls. My Nokia 1101 is very fast at making calls (quick dial), hanging up, changing profiles and the battery lasts a week, easily. If you’re on the move all day, making a long day or a business trip that lasts several days a phone like a Nokia 1101 can easily tag along without the need for packing a charger. It’s small too.
If you do need “more” you have the option of taking a tablet with you. Pick the size you like and when not needed you can leave it at work/home.
Smart phones are turning in to tablets, so why not use tablets instead of phones and make the phones phones again?
I have used and still own a 1110 and a 1112. Damn good devices. They know just a few tricks but they do them well and that is making calls, sending texts and managing a contact list.
Indeed, nothing beats these little guys on speed, battery life and even call quality. They’re so easy to use too. The 1110 has been and is still being used by my mom.
Agree. Love my E63 with symbian. Just minus a few feature like stop watch. And sync contact (If only it can sync contact with my gmail account). Sold it.
Edited 2013-04-15 02:43 UTC
As a phone, any recent Symbian runs circles around supposedly modern iPhones or Windows Phones (admittedly, less so with Android, but still). There are things that my precious E52 did with glowing ease but which my “fancy” new WinPhone cannot do. Likewise the oh-so-magnificent iPhone.
Yes, on the app front, there is NOTHING nice regarding the Symbian. The SDK is/was AWFUL and Qt was too little too late to remedy it. The app quality is reminiscent of the SDK.
But I don’t agree with the unilateral Symbian-bashing going on at technology sites (incl. here, unfortunately) purely based on the “app”-factor. The Symbian actually provided one heck of a phone.
Any cheap mobile phone will probably and most likely be a much better phone than an iPhone/WP/Android, because that’s its only purpose and everything about it is geared for that.
Despite being named (smart) phones today’s phone are really small computers. Using them to make and receive calls is for most people just a small percentage of the total number of things they do with them.
And I think this is where most if not all Symbian based phones fall flat. It’s a non-touch OS that was made touch. There aren’t many apps and the ones that are around don’t work very well. The system in general is slow compared to other phones.
So yes Symbian phones are nice phones, but people don’t want phones, they want computers in their pockets.
Let me see. My Symbian “phone” (the N79 and E51) had true multitasking, things could stay in the background and be running. I could use an emulator to run Curse of Monkey Island, I also tried Quake on it. I had a nice little Office app on it, some good games (if and when they came by), I had instant messaging apps, I had an IRC client, I had a browser (though it wasn’t the ones we’re used to now on Android, iOS or WP, but improved quite a bit in Belle), I had a dictionary app, I could run an FTP server using an app to transfer files, etc. WhatsApp was there, awesome clients like Gravity for Twitter and Facebook (unmatched I’d say by any modern day app) were there, and so much more.
Basically, IMO, Symbian as much of a handheld computer as these new OS, and in fact better in multitasking, speed, smoothness etc at lower requirements (helped by its long development cycle and decade old roots of course), it’s just that wasn’t brought up to par on time when it came to the UI. And it didn’t have as many apps.
So yeah, I do agree with the app factor, as apps are what people want on their smartphone, but Symbian was every bit a smartphone OS and as capable as these modern day OS. Which makes it even sadder that Nokia failed to react on time and we had to see such an awesome OS go, while we’re now stuck with iOS and Windows Phone which barely let you do things the way you want (not that that’s a bad thing for the majority of users), and Android, which does a lot, but runs on a crappy Java and Dalvik-based core that wants so much horsepower to run smooth and 3x RAM to have as many apps in the background as Symbian. (I love Android, I use it since it’s the only real alternative to Symbian for me right now, I love some of its features, but I see its issues clearly unlike the fanboys).
But again, Symbian was as capable an OS as any other. Not just a phone.
PS: It’s possible I may not have understood what you were actually trying to say and might have ranted unnecessarily. If I did, then I apologize.
Let’s not forget the fact that Symbian has proper USB-OTG support. Mice, external drives, keyboards, all over regular USB – no proprietary connectors involved.
In fact, just today I found out that the E7 supports, over USB… My Griffin iMic, an external USB soundcard.
Yeah, that too. If there ever was a “complete OS”, Symbian was it. Sure, it’s not got the great browser or apps we expect these days, but otherwise it was packed. Yes, lack of an app ecosystem meant Nokia/Symbian had to put in lots of stuff by default, but even hardware wise it supported a lot of things, and supported them well. Which you’ll notice in your time with the E7.
I think you do need to disconnect it before taking a call in public or else you would look rather silly.
Admittedly, so does android (on some devices, with the right kernel, and if the moon is waning gibbous) – though given the age difference, that’s not saying much.
I’ve been using Symbian when it was still called EPOC (on a Psion 3a). My latest Symbian device was a Nokia E90 and before that I had a Nokia 9500.
All devices mentioned were great at the time, but they just don’t compare against iPhone/WP/Android.
It isn’t what runs on it, but how well does it run? The web browser on the E90 was horrible to use, it was slow, it crashed often and it had rendering issues. It often left you wondering if it was still doing something or just hanging. An SSH client I had behaved the same: slow, crashing.
On iOS/WP/Android you have many more apps, for each need you have you have a large number of choice. On Symbian devices it was often, if not always, the case of hunting the web using a search engine (Google) to find at least one choice and hope it actually works. It was the same experience I had with my Palm T|X.
Now Symbian isn’t all bad, it certainly was a complete system and applications were often well done and clever, but it just isn’t as easy/quick to use as “modern” operating systems.
I loved my E7. Awesome to type on and I’d just pop a USB stick into a usb2go adapter to watch movies on the train.
Terrible battery life though,
Nokia has given me an e7 anna in replacement of my broken n900. I disliked it so much I’d buy a pre3, waiting for the n9 to come. And asked nokia to return a n9 in exchange of their e7.
Now I’m a happy n9 user
Just when it was starting to get good… Nokia got in bed with MS and dropped it. Are they in a better position now? It looks like they are not. Windows Phone does not really sell. The company became a litigious puppet for Microsoft… nobody really cares about them now.
I’ve got a 5800 Xpress Music and love it. Good hardware, good battery life, very nice music player and radio functions for long trips and a real GPS module that does not need an internet connection to pin-point your location.
It’s a real shame. The QtSDK was starting to make Symbian development a nice experience… Damn shame.
…and those Symbian phones are too slow.
There are a few great and modern apps, try Gravity (Twitter) and Poddi (podcasts).
I have a N8, I want to love it but it’s frustrating to use. The camera app is slow to load and slow to take pictures, the browser is very slow, the OS is globally slow and everything gets unresponsive when a few apps are opened.
I switched to a 920 and I love it, mainly because it’s super fast all the time.
I keep the N8 around for movie watching on the go, the HDMI output is really handy.
Apart from the speed (try browsing sites), Belle works great. And the hardware is great.
For a twitter client you try Tweetian. It’s being ported to SailfishOs (Jolla).
I work with an ITSD firm and below is a list of applications and basic notes that the company with whom I’m employed would use for E7 deploys. Hope this is helpful with your testing.
—
Upgrade to the latest firmware
Enable encryption (backup keys in case recovery is needed)
Software List:
Best Profiles:
ProfiMail:
X-Plore
Opera Mobile
Spotify
Podcatcher
mobbler
Fring
Nokia Battery Monitor 3.0
Nokia Big Screen
Nokia Car Mode
EasyRPN
GPSInfoQt
JoikuSpot
Nokia Public Transit
Nokia Panorama
Shazam
Google Maps
Youtube
Cutetube
YouTube Downloader
Adobe Reader
Putty
QuickOffice
Vlingo
ScreenSnap
DLNA Play
SYPE
Ovi Store Update
weather widget
nokia 3d world view
Latest Ovi Maps with regional maps downloaded for offline use
Thom, I think you should additionaly get some UIQ handset – that UI, from SE, was a notable and quite good earlier attempt at touchscreen phones.
PS. Maybe also Nokia 5800 or 5230 – first S60 touchscreens, (not so good) Nokia answer to iPhone. And/or some solid “classic” S60 device (like Nokia E50, among many others).
Maybe even some MOAP(S) handset?
(as a curiosity, nobody knows anything about them outside Japan)
Edited 2013-04-17 11:39 UTC