The latest on smartphones (and other gadgets)

It may not obvious from the E5 moniker, but this cool looking Symbian qwerty is the upgrade to the E72. Looks a bit like a cross between an E72 and a Palm Centro, and will be available in a range of fashionable colours. Looks like it will lose some of the metal in the E72 case in favour of plastic which is a pity, but I guess Nokia is trying to appeal to different market segment with this phone – the younger market looking for a qwerty device to do their facetwittering on.

The phone will run essentially the same software as the current E series, namely Symbian 3rd Edition S60, but with Feature Pack 2 which improves the UI. I have an E72 and call tell you that the Symbian interface is ancient and cumbersome when compared with WebOS, Android et al.

Nokia claims a standby time of up to 29 hours for the E5, which will be brilliant if it achieves this in real life conditions. Pity that Nokia is sticking with the 2.4 inch QVGA screen, which has a resolution that is noticebly lower than its competition such as the Blackberry Bold.

Corporate users of Lotus Notes will be happy to see built-in out-of-the-box support for Lotus Notes Traveler. I use this on my E72 and it works like a charm to sync my corporate emails, calendar and contacts. My corporate IT people tell me that it is also easier to setup and support than Blackberry. Never thought I’d hear such heresy from classic BB supporters.

Together with the E5, Nokia also announced the C3 and C6. The latter looks like a replacement for the N97 with a 3.2 inch touch screen (probably still resistive as the Finns don’t like to take their gloves off), and a landscape slide-out qwerty.

The C3 will run Symbian S40 which arguably puts it into the feature phone rather than smartphone category. It comes among other in bright pink.

According to Tania Steenkamp, Communications Manager for Nokia South Africa, the company does not plan to bring the Maemo-based N900 to South Africa. This is bad news all round for South Africans, especially if you were hoping to get it on a network contract upgrade, but if you are really desperate you can pick one up at Johannesburg-based Ca-Cellular for ZAR6,399.00.

Symbian is toast, at least for Nokia’s future top of the range devices. Maemo is the new Symbian. First used in Nokia’s internet tablet in 2005, the brand new N900 runs the latest Maemo incarnation. Looks very sleek, and with Mozilla as its web browsing technology, should be yum. Like just about every other new mobile OS, e.g. Palm WebOS, iPhone OS, etc, Maemo is also based on Linux. The latter may not have succeeded in dislodging Microsoft Windows from its pc throne, but it is a clear winner in the mobile world.

Ditching Symbian on its high-end phones is probably a good move on Nokia’s part. Symbian is solid, but old, and still can’t probably handle rich text format HTML emails. It also falls short in many other areas such as web browsing and on-line video. The latest Symbian adaption for Nokia touchscreen phones like the N97 and Express Music falls way short of the competition in terms of its user interface. Anyone that has used either of these phones will know about the confusing way in which you have to double-press in some places and single-press in others.

The best feature of the N900 is arguably its 3.5 inch 16 million colours touchscreen. But why another resistive touchscreen Nokia? It is time for a multi-touch capacitive screen. Everyone else has one, even Winmobile! I can understand that the Fins don’t want to take their gloves off, but it is warm where I am. No gloves here.