End of Week 1 with the Nokia E72 and Lotus Traveler
Sean Cull 7 December 2009 08:00:00
I've been using the E72 with Traveler ( 8.5.0.1 ) in anger for about a week now and I thought it would be useful to look back at the experience. I will try and update this further in another few weeks. My first impressions were previously recorded here.
The background to this is that I have come from a Blackberry Curve 8310, sent the Nokia N97 back after 2 days and am now trying the E72. I considered the Pre ( too new but played with one today and was impressed ) and Android ( too early but something to watch ).
I should say that I have found the review difficult to write. I had hoped to gush positively about Nokia's new Business Class Flagship phone but I have found it quite hard to use compared to my old Blackberry. It has some key advantages ( VOIP, Wifi ) over what I have had before but if I were supporting business users where ease of use and productivity were the key drivers ( rather than fancy features ) then I would worry about how those business users would find the Nokia E72 ( although it is streets ahead f the N97 in this regard )
Overall :
I think that the biggest thing I have noticed is that I probably took my old Blackberry too much for granted. It was an old model and didn't have WiFi but it worked well, the keyboard was great and it did the job with little fuss.
The Nokia has more potential in some areas, for example it has WiFi which is great for podcasts and faster web browsing. It also has VOIP which is a big plus except that I have an issue with the WiFi connectivity. The OVI Store should be an advantage but my experience is that it is pretty pathetic. The running costs of the Nokia with Traveler are substantially less than the blackberry with BES ( even ignoring the BES cost )
Would I recommend the E72 / Traveler to a corporate client over my trusty Blackberry ?
"Probably not" would be my current view, or at least not until someone in the in-house team has lived with that system for a few weeks and can take the Level 1 / 2 support calls.
"E72 withTraveler" Pro's
The third party running costs are substantially less than for the Blackberry. I have a free device, unlimited land line calls, 500 minutes of mobile calls and 500Mb of data per month for £35 over 18 months from Vodafone UK. If I was on a blackberry connected to a BES I would have to pay an additional charge to Vodafone and then to RIM for the BES licences. I must admit that the 500Mb is a slight worry but hopefully sensible use of WiFi should make it OK.
"E72 withTraveler" Cons
Traveler is not fully integrated into the E72. For example performing a text search on emails will not include Traveler emails - I can't find any way to search them. This is actually a BIG problem, for example when you want to find an airline reservation you can't just search for the email and it is practically impossible to find it otherwise ( unless you are folder orientated which I am not )
The home page only shows the last 1 or 2 subject lines meaning that you always need to click into the inbox to see what's there. A deeper multi-line view on the home page would be much better ( I think the BB did this )
You get some weird error messages from Traveler which I think are just plain misleading ( I could be wrong ). For example if there is a connectivity issue it reports that authentication failed. Other times it reports it cannot resolve the address of the Traveler server ( could be a carrier issue ). I spend a lot more time wondering if email is syncing than I ever did with the blackberry
I'm hoping that this is just me but I cannot see how to invite others to my meetings !
"E72 as a Device" Pros
> Its much more stable than the N97 ( 2.x )
> Never had a phone with wifi before - its great
> Never had a phone with VOIP before - its great ( see below on connectivity problems )
> The VOIP setup is quite clever in that the connectivity is policy based - you define your connections ( they call them destinations ) as Intranet, Extranet, etc.. and then you set the VOIP account to only use Intranet for example. This means that it will only use "free" resources rather than ones you get charged for but it does it in such a way that it can recognise several WiFi stations as intranet and a different set as Extranet. Unfortunately this only seems to be implemented for VOIP and not in other applications.
> The "Torch" function is cool although you need to be at the home page to trigger it ( see later about the home key )
> The form factor is nice and the build quality feels good
> The quick access buttons ( Home, Calendar, Contacts and Emails ) are useful
"E72 as a Device" Cons
> Please can I have a green button to Go and a red button to Stop. The phone looks great until you come to use it. Imagine handing the phone mid call to a colleague and saying please hang up when you are finished - I would wager that they will really struggle to know how to hang up - can you spot the keys that should be backlit red and green ?
There have been times when I have really struggled to answer or end a call - and I hope that is a reflection on the phone's design and not my mental capacity !
> Text messages, traveler emails, inbound calls, outbound calls and missed calls are all held separate views unlike the blackberry where you could see one chronological list of your activity.
> The keyboard is not great, I need to type with my fingernails rather than my fingers
> I keep trying to touch the screen - it is so funny watching my children ( 2 and 4 ) trying to use it - their natural instinct is to touch. I just accepted this restriction as a necessary trade off but having played with the Palm Pre today it does feel like the E72 is already a "legacy phone"
> Considering that the primary purpose of the phone is to make calls it is surprisingly difficult to use :
* The number keys do not stand out clearly enough
* You cannot hit the "off hook" button ( the one that should be green ) and dial a number You need to go to the home page and then start dialling
* To send a txt message you need at least 6 menu clicks from the person record
> The standard browser is OK but Opera works better in most regards. The show stopper with Opera is that if you go to type in a URL with r,t,y,u etc.. you get numbers and not letters. You can get around this but it is a real chew - this could obviously be an Opera issue rather than a Nokia issue. I haven't found a way to watch flash content on Opera yet although I can in the standard browser.
> The profiles settings ( General, Silent, Meeting etc.. ) seem pretty limited. For example I would like to be able to control connection to my wifi by profile. For example in the evening I would like to tell it not to look for Wifi signals - this doesn't seem to be possible although I think that it is in there somewhere.
> I have a problem where the Wifi drops out periodically. This effectively makes the phone absolutely useless for VOIP. This may be related to my Wireless Router from Draytec so I need to look into it further.
> The GPS is slow to update, this caused my wife and I to fall out briefly as she was trying to navigate using google maps. On the blackberry google maps worked great but on the E72 you have already driven past a junction before the system updates the location.
> The home key does not always take you home. There appear to be two desktops. the first is your home page with your widgets ( I don't think that technically they are widgets ) while the second is a "workspace". If you are composing an email in traveler and press home you go to the workspace and not the home page - which is generally OK but the torch doesn't work ( I really feel like I am nit picking now ) - the shortcuts / widgets on your home page, perhaps quickdials, can't be accessed either.
The Ovi Store
The OVI Store is worse than useless.
The E72 is not listed on the choice of phones with full keyboards.
I then find the E72 ( apparently they do not think it has a full keyboard unlike the E71 ) and I get this error message when I log in
You need some Nokia software to setup the voip system is it in the OVI store ? NO
You want some software to manage the downloading of podcasts - is it in the OVI store ? NO
I could go on and on with lots of examples but there is no point. The image below shows the recommended applications for the Nokia flagship business phone.
Issues with Vodafone
I live in an area of very good coverage for 2G and 3G - not in reality I'm afraid.
The 2G is passable - better than the last carrier but often only 2 bars
I get a 3G signal maybe 5% of the time and it disappears as soon as I touch the device
Comments on Applications
> The Gravity twitter client looks outstanding
> The Nokia podcast management software for S60 3rd edition does not work on the E72 ( no reason given other than that there is an issue with the digital signature ) so you have to use a third party application called escarpod - this is daft as podcasts are a mainstream business tool these days.
> The Escarpod podcast management tool looks really promising but I am not sure if it is meant to be fully automatic - it has an RSS reader ( which doesn't like "The Taking Notes Podcast" for some reason ) but I have to manually trigger it - might just be me and it is free so I am happy to work around some issues.
In the settings you also need to specify the connection to use. This has obvious benefits in controlling your data spend but the setting requires you to specify a specific connection rather than a class of connection like the VOIP settings do ( see above ) . The other thing is that to get the podcasts to appear in the media play application ( Escarpod also has its own player functionality ) you need to manually refresh the library as far as I can tell.
> I couldn't get the bundled WiPresenter application to work on bluetooth ( I have a Toshiba stack ) or Wifi and the documentation from the supplier is very limited. Shame as it looked promising.
> The multiscanner tool for extracting details from business cards via the camera is surprisingly good
> A password storage application would have been better in the bundle than some of the other apps included.
Lotus Nokia traveler
2Sean Cull 18/01/2010 07:59:04 No Gems but some improvement Hi Paul, I will do more of a write up soon but no huge improvement. I reset the E72 and started again. Traveler does seem to be more stable, I have reduced the amount of stuff stored on the phone by not including the sent folder and this seems to have helped - it would be interesting to know where the Traveler data is stored - It wasn't readily apparent to me. The other possibility is that I have not re-installed SIP/VOIP. The wifi drop outs made this useless so until I can resolve those there is no point having it. I have no proof but the SIP system did allow more configuration of the connections and I am wondering if this confused traveller. The other thing which has sorted itself out is typing urls into Opera. I appear to have the same version of opera (10.0) but the keypad now creates letters rather than numbers - not sure why. The lack of searching within Traveler emails is probably my number 1 issue with an apparent inability to create invites on others as number 2 - I am still hoping that this last one is a misunderstanding on my part. Sean
Please leave a comment
1Paul 24/12/2009 10:16:12 E72
Hi, thanks for the write up - have just started playing with the E72 and having similar frustrations. Agree about the lack of touchscreen - so annoying. Have you discovered any other gems since?