Business blog

The Nokia E72 is basically a straight upgrade of the Nokia E71 including a faster processor and a better camera. The E71 has been out in the UK since  June 2008 and is one of the best selling mobile phones for business users in the UK and overseas, so how does it size up to it’s older brother?

Nokia E72 business mobile Phone

It looks very similar to a typical Blackberry in terms of size, shape and the QWERTY keyboard but how does it really measure up to the other Smartphones on the market.

It is a very pretty phone as you will see from the video below, mind you, it’s not as nice as the new HTC Desire or for that matter the i-phone but i guess that is a matter of opinion; if you are a fan of the front facing QWERTY keyboard then you will probably find it quite a geeky turn on. It looks pretty business like with the silver rim running around the edge and simple style.

As with all of the Nokia E range there are the four short cut buttons under the screen for the home, calendar, contacts and email. Under these four are the call and end call buttons.

Between the short-cut buttons is a nice optical track pad for general navigation around the menu which is relatively responsive and nice to use.

The QWERTY keyboard keys are slightly tougher and more pronounced than on the Nokia E71 which makes for more accurate and quicker typing so a good improvement on its predecessor, the keys are softer than on the BlackBerry Bold 9700 as they are made of plastic but are not quite as pronounced so although an improvement on the E71 they are not as easy to use as the latest Blackberry QWERTY keys.

The Nokia E72 runs on the Symbian Series S60 third addition operating system and business mobile phone users will find the the office section within the menu is excellent as you can create notes, view AND create excel and word files with the Quickoffice, view PDFs, use a dictionary and calculator.
The home screen on the device gives quick access to a lot of features.

The media tab within the main menu takes you through to a further ten functions including a radio, media player, music store, recorder, gallery, camera, share online, realplayer, video centre and music search.

The media player can be used for listening to music and the new 3.5 mm headphone socket means that a larger number of standard headphones can be used with this mobile phone than with the Nokia E71. The sound quality is good and the supplied headphones are absolutely fine, but obviously not as good as specialist headphones – the sound goes up to a good volume, at least enough to drown out the goings on on the train to the office in the morning.

The video formats are a little limited but you can download a divx player to give you more choice.

The browser is fair; pages loaded quickly enough apart from a couple of the larger sites that i visited which took a good 5 to 10 seconds which, if you are on the phone to a client is not ideal and a little disappointing after having my hands on the HTC Desire.However, you can scroll down the page nice and easily.

The phone comes with both 3G and Wi-Fi so download speeds are pretty good. The main downer is the 2.4 inch screen which means that you cannot see the full web page on most screens so have to keep scrolling from right to left – this is my pet hate with web browsing on mobile phones so a big cross mark on this one.

Messaging and emailing is nice and easy with the QWERTY keyboard, when you first go into the email function you will be prompted to connect your accounts.It is not really comparable to many of the other Smartphones out there but is pretty good none the less.

One function that i really liked was that you could have 2 profiles running on the phone; one for business mobile use and one for when you leave the office.

You can have your email with Microsoft exchange at work and then on hotmail or whatever you use in the evening. you can also have a diary for business and one for your social life. It’s always good to have a clear definition between the two sides to your life so a great feature – nice one!

The cameras on Nokia phones are usually pretty good and they have done so again with the nokia E72 as it is a 5 mega pixel camera so pretty good quality – the LED flash was basic but had OK results – as with most mobile phones it performs best outside in good light.

The Nokia E72 can be had for free on a £20-per-month, 24-month contract, or for around £300 SIM-free so pretty cheap as business mobile phones go for small numbers of users.

I think that even Blackberry owners would have to admit that the apps available for Blackberry mobile phones are far outstripped in choice, quality and price by those available for the i-phone. Nonetheless, there are some great apps out there for Blackberry business mobile phone owners and here are our pick of the best.

Evernote is a multimedia capable electronic notebook. You can take text notes, ideas, and the results from your company brainstorms, you can also store audio files, photos, such as snapshots of your whiteboard following business meetings or in many of the modern style gastro pubs you can take a shot of the big blackboard menu and take it back to your table for everyone to have a look at. As well as this you can record audio from interviews and talks or presentations. You can take these files from either your desktop or your phone, you can then search through them later.

ExpenseLog Pro is a relatively cost-effective system for businesses who need to manage their expenses on the go. It is easy to set up and you can use for your team within minutes.Great for businesses where your team all have Blackberry smartphones.

Voice on the Go helps to increase the amount of time that you can spend communicating on your Blackberry mobile phone, this can increase productivity. You can email, search contacts, listen to appointments and reply by voice while driving safely.

The Copy2Contact application by Anagram Technologies can take information from calls, emails and text messages and copy that information to your contacts. This means that you can work faster and harder by doing more on the move and having more information easily at your disposal. This application takes all of the information and transforms it into a new or updates an existing contact. If an appointment time and place are discussed at a meeting then this Blackberry business app can transfer that information to your BlackBerry calendar.

Telenav is the Blackberry’s best (we feel) GPS Navigator™. You get very clear and simple voice and onscreen driving and walking directions with automatic rerouting and full-color 3D moving maps that display your current location.

WiFi File Transfer App WiFi File Transfer App helps workers to instantly send files from BlackBerry to computer, computer to BlackBerry, or BlackBerry to printer. So, print the emailed directions while leaving the room, bring an unfinished document or list of phone numbers, you can fill out and print a contract over a WiFi network at your client’s office. Impatica Impatica allows you to deliver graphically rich, animated Microsoft® PowerPoint® presentations to your colleagues and external clients through BlackBerry smartphones.

Call time tracker is designed to improve the efficiency of client relationships. it allows you to log the amount of time that you spend on each of your clientsthe app pops up between calls and emails and asks the user to allocate which client and project their calls relate to. It will even assist with emails sent from the mobile phone; tracking time spent writing to clients. With the monthly report generated and sent via email, this is great for at least understanding which clients you spend your time on so you can then quickly interpret where you need to re-focus your time.

Google Maps A great free app that is perfect for finding your way to meetings and to social engagements of for helping explain to others how to get to you familar destinations through quickly saving and sending a map from your Blackberry mobile.

One thing that has been interesting about Blackberry Apps for business is the number of vertical specific ones – take a browse through to see what is available for the industry that you work in.

Of course there are thousands more apps for Blackberry mobile phones that will save you and your business time and money. To browse all go to Blackberry App World. Problem is, if you are just wanting to browse and do not own a Blackberry mobile phone then you are going to find it difficult getting in. This link will get you in the backdoor to the business mobile phone apps for Blackberry app world.

Sony Ericsson Vivaz business mobile

Sony Ericsson have now introduced the new Sony Vivaz mobile phone as a successor to their flagship Satio mobile phone.

Here we review it to see how it compares and also mainly to see if it is a realistic and quality business mobile phone.

The main selling point of the phone is the camera and the video camera, the camera is 8.1 mega pixels and the video camera can record 720p HD video and also has 8 gigs of memory card storage.

This touchscreen business mobile phone has been fairly well designed and sits nicely in the palm, but it does look plastic and does not have the same quality look or feel as a lot of the current smartphones. It has a great range of social networking and multi-media features, the Sony Ericsson Vivaz is set to give the likes of the Nokia X6 and the LG InTouch Max GW620 a run for their money.

However it is very different to the popular business mobile phones such as the Blackberry’s, the i-phone and the HTC Desire – it probably suits the younger, more media savvy business person best.

Here is a short video review of the Sony Ericcson Vivaz

It’s a lightweight handset and pretty slick, so slick in fact that  I found it all too easy to drop.

The Sony Vivaz is available in 4 different colour options, the best selling are the silver and ruby options.

The touch screen is fairly good, not as sensitive and accurate as the i-phone or the HTC Desire but it is not far off.

On the front of the phone there are the call and end buttons as well as the menu button, with volume/zoom and two camera buttons on the right side panel, as well as the power/lock on the top.

The latter can be a bit fiddly to hit when holding the Vivaz in just one hand.

Consistent with the focus on the younger business user there is a 3.5mm headphone jack to allow you to plug in your own headphones – a great plus for heavy media users.

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz comes with a charger plug, separate USB to microUSB cable to connect to the plug or to your PC, a pair of Sony Ericsson headphones and a standalone stylus – not so useful I felt.

The headphones that come with the phone have a built in microphone so can double as a hands free kit for the car.

The Symbian S60/S1 operating system is commonly found on mobile phones like the Nokia 5800, N97 and X6 but the phone is still very typical of a Sony Ericsson.

The menus are clear and easy to navigate but the sub menu’s seem fairly cramped. You can customise the home screen with the functions that you use the most which reduces the amount of navigation that you have to do.

Sony Ericsson Vivaz

The default set up offers a row of five widget tabs across the top of the screen which can be customised as you wish – i really liked this function and felt that it was useful for all users not just business mobile phone users.

Although it’s nice to have the customisation options they are not as varied and wide ranging as the options on other business mobile phones such as the HTC Tattoo and LG InTouch Max GW620, where a wider of widgets are on offer.

To lock/unlock the keys you need to hit the lock/unlock button and then select yes/no on screen – personally I liked this as i hate it when I just unlock the phone by accident so appreciate the two button process but I know that this will annoy other users.

The only difficulty is that it is quite easy to press the lock/unlock button too hard and accidentally switch the phone off. Also annoying is the length of time taken for the Sony Ericsson Vivaz to close down, and starting up again isn’t exactly lightning fast.

It was also far too easy to forget to choose any option from the menu and just leave the keys and screen active in your pocket or bag, from which all keys and screen can be accidentally pressed due to the resistive screen.

The Sony vivaz auto-rotate function takes a second or two too long to work.

As well as this the handset’s multi-tasking feature is a little tricky to use as things do not close down easily but I did find it easy to switch between functions.

Simply using the menu or end buttons keeps them open in the background, so you end up with several unnecessary things running, slowing the handset right down and taking away all the advantages of the Vivaz’s fast processor.

Like the Blackberry Apps World it is easy to download new apps for the home screen with the PlayNow app store but there are not as many good functional apps as the i-phone or Blackberry have and they are not as well focused for the business user.

The apps provided include; music, game and wallpaper downloads as well as other apps, but they’re generally not cheap and there are very few free options, I found this just disappointing compared to the other mobile phones on the market.

It’s very easy to get to the dial pad on the home screen and it is also easy to access the contacts function as you can access it through the call button and through the menu.

The quality of the sound on calls with the Sony Ericsson Vivaz is pretty good; both the caller and the recipient’s voices were clear and comfortable to hear, although there was a little static on the Vivaz’s end.

The individual contact entries are very good for business users as you can enter multiple numbers and email addresses as well as company information, job title and photos to help you include all necessary info which can easily be forarded onto your colleagues.

Favourite contacts can be saved to one of the five home screen tabs for quick and easy access. but you can’t synch your phone book with your social networking profiles.

There are a good range of messaging options including SMS text messaging, email options and an SMS conversations view – which basically shows your texts in another format and it also has a range of granular message settings.

It was very easy to set up an email account on the Sony ericcson Vivaz – I just registered the email address, entered in the username and password and the phone set up the rest.

It was also pretty easy to set up exchange email, It was quick to synch with the server but we did have to input the settings manually.

A significant problem for the business mobile phone user is that the phone only synch’s email messages each time the inbox is actually opened which is not great – it would be more more effective if push mail was configured by default as business mobile phone users really need live mail.

Typing is OK as I briefly mentioned earlier, but the touchscreen is not as good as some of the other smartphones on the market, also there is no autocorrect function, which is a real annoyance for minor mistakes. There is a dodgy stylus but none of us really have time for those anymore and have higher expectations since the i-phone’s release.

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz only connects to the internet when you open an application requiring the internet, not a problem but not as convenient as the leaders of the business mobile phone market.

It does work out well if you’re on a budget in terms of minutes but frustrating if you have unlimited web access as part of your contract.

It also kept asking me what kind of internet connection I wanted to use every time i used an application that was reliant on internet access, this wasted time and was frustrating for heavy mobile phone users.

Web browsing was frustratingly slow, the larger, more media heavy web pages took up to a minute to download. Connecting to the internet through the Wi-Fi connection was more consistent but even slower.

There is a good zoom function for web browsing that allows you to focus in on parts of web pages that you are interested in but there was a lot of scrolling back and forth as with most mobiles with a screen of this size.

Another issue is that the Sony Ericsson Vivaz isn’t Flash compatible, so Flash-based sites will render only as plain text.

There are good web connections and apps for Youtube and BBC as well as some social networking apps which generally worked well, but again the constant need to log in quickly wore me down when testing the web abilities of the Sony Vivaz.

Because of this I really cannot recommend this phone for business mobile phone users as almost all will need good email and web access.

Moving on….The camera is actually a high quality one with 8.1MP as well as a good video camera and compares well to a mid range digital camera.

There are two separate buttons to open the video and simple camera functions, as well as this there is an on screen function to switch between the two.

There’s no manual focus but you can select between specialist options for specific types of shots; macro for close-ups, infinite mode for landscape shots and portrait mode and as well as these options there is an auto focus option.

The camera handled colours well, even in incandescent light and was one of the best mobile phones that i have tested for it’s camera abilities so far.

Overall, this is not a phone that i can recommend for business mobile phone users at this price point. If you do have a specific need for a relatively good camera and video camera as well as simple email and web options then it may be fit for your purpose but considering what else is currently on the market i cannot honestly push this one.