Cheap Nokia E72 Unlocked Phone with GPS and Free Voice Navigation -- U.S. Version with Full Warranty (Zodium Black)

I hope Nokia pays a harsh price for what it has done.

This phone should never have been released to the public. In fact, seeing as what the E71 was, this phone should never have been built. It reeks of cost cutting and business manager interference, where some moron MBA decided they knew what was the best way to bring this phone to market. This is the kind of phone that is a brand killer for any serious user, or any of the long-time Nokia users who know what the brand is supposed to stand for. This isnt one of the crappy little $20 phones they build for verizon because they have to. It's $400, top of the line, supposedly. And it's awful. A disgrace, so let me fill you in on why.

First a few things, just so you know where Im coming from :

1) Ive been a Nokia user for over a decade. Owned probably close to ten different phones. Always eagerly awaited the next one. I know the symbian s60 system pretty well, so my points below aren't coming from someone who doesn't yet understand the phone.

2) My last phone was the E71, which Ive had since it was released. If you are an E71 user, and love that phone like I do, and were just hoping for a few tweaks to make it even better, well, you are going to be immensely disappointed with the E72.

3) If you know nothing of the E71, (or even the E51, or E63) you should still read this, because even if that phone did not exist, the E72 in and of itself is a disaster.

With that, I say : welcome to disappointment centrale! Wow.

This phone ,the E72, unlocked US version, is like a distant [...] cousin or something to the E71. It sort of looks like the E71, but crappier. Right out of the box, feels crappier. Cheaper. You almost know it's made in china before you look at the box and confirm the "telefono hecho en China" (like they thought they could disguise it by writing it in Spanish. Morons.

Let's talk build quality :

So I thought, maybe it feels light and cheaply made because of the plastic, or because the battery isnt in yet. Maybe, right. Well, go to put the battery in - ick, here starts the bad experience with the phone. A flimsy little plastic tab that doesnt really release the battery cover properly. Plus they changed the neat design on the back of the E71 to something boring. And of course, as many have noticed, the back cover does not seat tightly. Yes, it's easier to open than the E71, but with the E71, you NEVER thought that one day the back cover would fail. And it didnt jiggle around. (Yes, this review is going downhill fast.) And the battery life isn't nearly as long as the E71.

Next up, when you look at the back of the phone, you notice this THING jutting out. Ohhh, the camera, which is still only marginally better than the E71 (wont replace your canon, sorry), but now annoyingly bulbous and in the way. Why?

On the side of the phone, the E71 had nice rubbery covers for the usb and memory card - this one, hard plastic, with the motorola style attachment that you can already see coming off months before it finally does. For those like me who want to use this as a modem via usb, but also put it in your pocket...ahh, yes, wait til that breaks off, then gets gunked up with pocket lint. Joy! But even better, try to open these things. You either have to have long fingernails, or use some sort of device to pry it open. Great. This pretty much assures you that you'll drop the phone one day trying to open up the usb tab.

Speaker - incredibly tinny versus the E71. I'm embarrassed by the audio on this thing now. Sad. And they removed many of the really good audio clips, tones, etc, that were on the E71, and replaced them with garbage.

Plug for earphones (headset) - go ahead and try it, then look at what you've done. Yup the plug seats at an angle, which just looks bad. Yes the top of the phone is sloped, but that doesn't mean the jack should go off at an angle.

Four way key - very unpleasant to use (more below on this) - when you click it to the right, it sticks a bit, so if you next go to click to the left, it first clicks to get unstuck, then you can move left. Ridiculous. The center button, complete mush. No click sensation, just a mushy "I think I pushed it in" effect. Horrid. I can only hope that mine is defective, because this is completely unacceptable. But the sharp edge on the thing is by design. And it's awful to use. Did someone think that if they made the edge sharp, they'd force people to use the center optical scroll button?

Main menu keys. This is probably more the fault of a stupid engineer, rather than an MBA. But who knows....on the E71, the four main keys are just that, four individual main keys. On the E71, they aren't. Perhaps it was for visual effect, but the key surfaces are all integrated, melding into a short stumpy capital "I" shape. And when you push one of them, like you often do with Nokia's operating system, you get a soft mushy response. No click. The bottom two have slightly more of a click feel, but the top two are mostly mush. FAIL.

Now, granted the build quality is horrible compared to the E71, but the software, adios mios...the software.

Business phone, right? Yup. E series. Enterprise. Well, this phone will put you out of business if you rely on it. In fact, you just cant rely on it.

Email - with E71, you had two options, with your gmail and yahoo type accounts easily set up and very functional through Nokia Messaging. And your pop mail for work, like I have, could go through the other email system on the phone. Both worked fine, although the mail settings for the pop mail were not actually push, but rather every 5 minutes that it would check, so, no instantaneous email. With the e72, all the mail is routed through nokia messaging. That would actually be great, except one big thing. IT DOESNT WORK most of the time. Even when it does work, there is no option to view mail in HTML. Every single forking email you have to click once to open, then click again to view as HTML. And when you do so, what happens? Every email typically takes 10 to 30 seconds to load, if it loads at all. Disaster, unusable in its current form. Sometimes, when you open the program, and try to delete out your emails...they disappear with the (x) delete key on the side. Sometimes, they dont. Other times, a message that youve already viewed, try to open it again, nothing. NOT READY FOR PRIMETIME.

Optical keypad - had to turn it off after a few days. Here is the problem...no matter how fast or slow or hard or soft you move your thumb across the area, it moves one item. This is NOT the functionality that makes a scrollball/trackball useful. Therefore, it serves almost no purpose. The only reason it is at all useful is that they redesigned the 4way pad around the optical key, with nice sharp edges, and made it really stiff too, so if you have to use it a lot, like I do, eventually it digs into your thumb and is quite annoying. FAIL.

Web browsing - faster in terms of processing a page, and faster for scrolling around. But for some reason, many many times you click on the browser and it just sits, lifeless. You close it, start again, even when it says a decent signal with 3G. Nothing. Most of the time its unusable. Other times, you click on your bookmark...it starts going, then sure enough - invalid server name. Other times, you go to bookmark manager, and sometimes the bookmarks work, and other times, you click on them, and nothing. Plus, the menu items for additional browser menus are screwed up. You use the close button to close one of the window tabs, as you would on the E71, sometimes it closes that window, other times, it closes the whole web browser program and you have to start over. Added skyfire as a workaround, same problem with connectivity. Does not seem to want to pick up the ATT internet signal. FAIL.

Now yes, many of these software issues will likely be resolved with a new firmware update. But when? If a person buys this phone, is already up and running with the E71, and thinks they are going to have a working phone, they are out of luck, so they are stuck with two phones. One, they just bought, but they cant use it because it's totally screwed up. And this is for the lucky people who have a phone with a build quality that, while cheap, isn't defective. I, on the other hand, am going to have to send mine back, because the fourway key is clearly screwy. But do you REALLY think I want to roll the dice with this phone again, given the potential for just receiving another phone with a different set of issues? No, I dont.

This company can't be admonished enough for what they have done with this phone. Please please please, DO NOT BUY THIS PHONE. If you want to go down this road with Nokia, get the E71. The E72 should be discontinued, and we should all get refunds for this turd.

3/3/10 update : finally a firmware update, 3 months after Ive owned the phone. Result - mail still broken, web browser still flawed, phone still an expensive piece of crap. And now it's $70 less than what I paid for it, and freebies thrown in. Can you say RIPOFF? Next update will be when I contact Nokia for a refund/exchange. And one more thing was pointed out on this phone in recent days, to my embarrassment : the earpiece, at the top of the phone, is crooked. How's that for a nice touch?Get more detail about Nokia E72 Unlocked Phone with GPS and Free Voice Navigation -- U.S. Version with Full Warranty (Zodium Black).