Mobile Phone Reviews – Cheap Mobiles

The E55 is the latest and smallest of Nokia’s E-series, business-focussed handsets. It measures a mere 9.9mm at its thickest point, so it really is incredibly slim for a fully-featured smartphone. But despite it’s thinness, it shares the same impressive build quality as the other phones in the E-series range and certainly feels like it could stand up to a few knocks and scrapes.

The front face of the E55 is dominated by its large 2.4in display. The screen’s resolution at 320 x 240 pixels is pretty good for its size and certainly provides enough room to comfortably view web pages or read longer emails. It looks pin sharp, too, and is relatively bright, although outdoors in direct sunlight it can be a tad difficult to read at times. However, in this respect it’s not all that much worse than screens on many other devices we’ve used.

Beneath the display, Nokia has added two shortcut buttons for the calendar and email client, which let’s face it, are the two features you’re most likely to use on a daily basis. For navigation there’s a chunky and responsive D-pad, plus two soft keys mounted on either side of the screen.

However, it’s the main keypad that’s perhaps the E55’s most distinguishing feature. It’s a 20-key, half-QWERTY affair, with two characters per key. To input the first letter you tap once, and to input the second you tap twice.

Alternatively you can avoid the need to multi tap by simply typing once on each key and letting the predictive text engine work out what word you’re trying to input. This approach has been taken before on previous handsets, but with rather limited success. However, it works much better here mainly because the predictive text engine Nokia has used is much better than on those older models. You really can just tap away while letting the predictive text engine sort out the words in the background. We’re used to the iPhone’s soft keyboard and predictive text combination, which we’re quite fond of, but the Nokia was probably a bit easier to get up to speed with and led to fewer mistakes.

The handset runs the 3rd edition of Nokia’s Series 60 smartphone OS. Series 60 may not be the flashiest OS around, but it is very straightforward to use. It also includes a decent line-up of applications as standard including the QuickOffice software, PDF viewer and Windows Live Messenger. We also like the way you can set up and easily switch between work and personal profiles via a simple icon on the home screen.

The phone’s browser is impressive too. While it can’t compete with the likes of Safari on the iPhone or Google’s browser on Android, it’s definitely one of the better browsers we’ve seen on a candybar style phone, as it generally does a good job on page formatting and pops up a nice thumbnail view of previously visited pages when you hit the back button. The browser also supports Flash Lite, so some – but by no means all – Flash content can be displayed.

Buy the Nokia E55

The HTC Hero was probably the most popular Android device to hit the market in 2009, and now the follow-up has arrived in the form of the Legend. And legendary it seems indeed.

The HTC Legend is crafted out of a single block of aluminium, like the Nexus One, making it much lighter than the Hero. It also feels better in the hand and is smaller.

For those fearful about the full metal body interfering with signal, the aerial forms part of the battery door, rather than being buried deep within the metal body. A bonus really – no one wants the issue of dropped calls and lack of signal as seen on the iPhone.

Because it’s made from one single piece of metal, rather than the frame and body being separate, it can up upscaled and downscaled easily – maybe a Legend Mini is on the horizon?

However, one of the most important new features in the HTC Legend is the upgraded HTC Sense UI.

Although most aspects are identical to the HTC Sense we already know, issues have been ironed out and features have been tweaked to make it much faster to use.

Previously, the People widget used only Favourites to organise your contacts list. Now you can also group your contacts to make your social life easier to manage.

There are also a whole load of new widgets including calendar, which allows you to view your upcoming meetings and events in one stream, Friend Stream that collates all of your contact’s messages across Twitter, Facebook and Flickr in one list. You can also post new tweets, comments and replies straight from the widget.

Our favourite new feature of Sense is what HTC calls Helicopter View. To see what’s on each of the homescreens, you can pinch the screen and all seven homescreens are displayed with widgets sketched on them. Just tap the homescreen you want to see and it’ll take you there.

In terms of hardware, the Legend looks pretty similar to the Hero, except in place of the trackball there’s an optical mouse.

Put simply, it’s pretty much like an optical mouse turned upside down – there’s no large surface area as there is on a BlackBerry 9700 or 8520. It’s a single dot that lights up as your finger runs over it. Surrounding the dot is a silver ring that clicks when depressed.

It’s certainly a much better option than a trackball, as you won’t find fluff getting stuck it it, there’s no fear of it falling out and the bearings will never die.

The 3.2-inch AMOLED screen is capacitive, naturally. It’s also super-responsive, as you’d expect from HTC.

The camera uses a 5-megapixel sensor, and an LED flash. Although we didn’t get to test the camera stringently, we assume it’ll be on par with that of the Nexus One. HTC has clearly been working hard on its imaging functions, but we’d still like a xenon flash, or dual-LED, despite HTC claiming dual LED is too bright.

As you’d expect, the Legend operates on Android 2.1, so brings with it all the new treats including basic voice controls and interactive wallpapers.