The biggest announcement from Nokia, the market leading handset manufacturer didn’t arrive until day two of the event. On the first day, Nokia showed off two new members of the E-series family, the E55 and the E75, alongside the 6710 Navigator and 6720 Classic.
The E75 has long been known about through many leaks and rumours on the internet, and you can think that Nokia are behind most of these. Of all the manufacturers Nokia seem to be the most clued up when it comes to working with various bloggers and listening to feedback via social networking sites. The E75 will look familiar to anyone who has used an E-series handset recently. Well made from durable material, the stand out feature of the E75 is the incorporation of a slide out QWERTY keyboard. Stylish to look out, the keyboard has done nothing to ruin the looks of the handset, which is surprisingly thin at just 14.4mm.
But if thin is your thing then you needed to see the E55. Less rumoured than the E75 was, the E55 comes to market as the slimmest handset in its class, just 9.9mm. A replacement for the very popular E51, the E55 has a keypad that is reminiscent of the Blackberry Pearl, where two letters share one key in a kind of SureType layout. Although not grabbing as many headlines as the E75, the E55 itself is well featured, bringing to the table GPS support, 3.2 Megapixel camera, WiFi, HSDPA and HSUPA for high speed uploading and downloading of files.
The 6720 Classic is an upgrade to the 6220 Classic. Nokia have enhanced the data transfer speeds available on this phone, with HSDPA up to 10.2 Mbps, which Nokia call ‘Turbo 3G’. Build quality is slightly improved and there is also room for a larger capacity battery.
The 6710 Navigator is in turn an upgrade to the 6210 Navigator announced last year. Again, there is improvement in build quality, along with an increase in the screen size, making the 6710 Navigator more suitable as an in car navigation device. The camera has also been increased from 3.2 to 5.0 Megapixel.
The big announcement from Nokia, at this year’s MWC though, came on day two. Long rumoured, Nokia announced the N86 8MP. Finally, Nokia were throwing their hat into the 8.0 Megapixel cameraphone ring; and with the N86 8MP they have a top candidate. Not only supporting 8.0 Megapixel, the camera also has a bespoke, designed for the phone, Carl Zeiss Lens, has variable aperture settings and also includes a mechanical shutter. Based on the top selling Nseries N85, the N86 8MP takes its name much the same way the N95 8GB did, focussing on the main feature of the handset.
Whilst Nokia have been cleaning up the imaging arena recently, with most of their new mid and high range phones supporting at least 3.2 and more commonly, 5.0 megapixels, they are late to the show with just their first 8.0 Megapixel phone announced. It remains to be seen just how much Nokia push this out to other handsets.