Nokia E55 – With semi-QWERTY keyboard

The new mantra in gadgets these days is to go thin. The manufacturer claims that its device is thin and it attracts a lot of attention. I don’t blame them; I still can’t get over iPod Nano 2GBs slim profile. I refuse to believe that a music player can be so thin. Nokia is claiming that its latest offering, the E55, is the world’s thinnest phone ever. Now I cannot vouch for that since I’d have to compare it with a lot of other phones. What I can vouch for is that this phone is indeed really thin and were it not for the weight, you wouldn’t have felt the weight in your pocket at all. The handset is just half an inch thick. On the front, there is a big enough. It supports 1.6 million colors which is really good. The photos and videos look good on the screen and the text too is legible enough. The screen struggled in bright sunlight though. But I won’t take off points for this since it is not unexpected in a LCD display.

Underneath the display, there is the navigation array. It was made up of four way navigation bar with OK button in the middle, two soft keys, Call and End buttons and four more buttons for shortcuts. Underneath this, there is a hybrid QWERTY keyboard. This is a bit different from standard QWERTY keyboard. Each buttons has two letter dedicated for it; the typing experience is better than numeric keypad but not as good as the full QWERTY keyboard.  Preference is purely subjective but I liked it. The number of buttons is less than what you have on the full QWERTY keyboard and the experience is quite good too.

Typing on the Nokia E55 was easy even though the buttons are not raised above the surface. There are grooves between the buttons so there is plenty of spacing here. The semi-QWERTY keyboard also keeps the phone tidy. I have a couple of friends who say that QWERTY keyboards make the phone look a bit ugly. If you belong to this category, then you will love this handset. I certainly won’t recommend this phone to people who type long e-mails.

Nokia E55 contains all the features that you’d expect in a Symbian S60 device. There is Microsoft Exchange Server settings, IMAP and POP3 for e-mail from Gmail, Yahoo or any other service. There is also GPS courtesy of free Nokia Ovi maps. There is also access to Microsoft Office documents courtesy of QuickOffice application. It doesn’t have full functionality though, you will have to pay extra for that.

E series Nokia phones are made for business users but looking at the features, I think multimedia enthusiasts will be pleased too. The price of this phone is $339 but it is the unlocked price which is pretty good. If you have the money I’d recommend you to go for this phone. If you don’t, you might want to wait till this phone is picked up by a service provider.