Nokia E52 Preview- Great battery life...

 
As a part of the E-Series family, the E52 is a bit of a black shee
It's a messaging phone, but it doesn't have a QWERTY or dual-QWERTY
keyboard. Perhaps its extraordinary battery life will come to its rescue.

Upside

At 9.9mm thick the E52 is the mobile phone equivalent of a size zero. But as with supermodels, is there such a thing as a phone being too skinny? We think not, in fact as long as the phone is sturdy enough not to snap in the middle we say the thinner the better.
The big drawcard for the E52 though is its reported 23 days standby battery life, and eight hours of talk-time. These are startling figures if you consider that the E52 will make use of HSDPA data, Wi-Fi, GPS and Nokia's new push email messaging client. Of course, the quoted figures are most likely excluding extra connectivity like push email, but if the battery can handle 23 days in standby then it probably does better than most at powering always-on features and data transfers during web browsing.
Interestingly the E52 will feature a new ARM processor, a 600MHz chip as opposed to the 369MHz processor found in the E75. This is another feature we'd have thought would significantly drain a phone's battery, and yet the E52 should still be one of the most power efficient mobiles in market if Nokia's claims prove true.

Downside

Nokia's family of E-Series messaging phones is growing faster than we think is necessary. Last year saw two E-Series devices, the full-QWERTY candybar E71, and the slider with a numeric keypad E66. Even with just a choice of two there is no doubting the popularity of the E71, which crushed the E66 into forgettable dust. This year we've seen the E75 in the flesh and heard about the announcements of the E55 and E52, and the differences between all three handsets are smaller still, especially between the latter two.

In line with this train of thought, what is the real purpose of a Nokia messaging phone with a standard numeric keypad? Take away the stainless steel trim and the E52 would look and work like a Nokia 6220 Classic. Nokia will tell us that the E-Series is differentiated by its software perhaps, but the recent Classic series updates used the same processor and version of the Series 60 operating platform, and will run the same software. Plus you'd probably get a better camera with a Classic series handset.

Overall

We don't want to be too unsympathetic before we see the E52, but if it's a messaging handset then we want something about the phone to say this; a QWERTY keyboard is always a good place to start. The extended battery life is not to be sneezed at, and here's hoping Nokia finds a way to incorporate these stellar battery cycles across all phones in its range. The E52 will be in Australia in the second half of 2009.