Business as usual
The Nokia E7 was first announced at Nokia World, a full six months ago. The announcement itself was drowned out by the shock replacement of Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo as CEO by Canadian Microsoft man Stephen Elop. This set a precedent that has dogged the E7 ever since.
On the day before Nokia World, the incumbent smartphone boss at Nokia announced he too was leaving, but hung around long enough to launch the E7. You can imagine which was the bigger story, as Vanjoki ranted at Google and Apple and defended Symbian. Then Nokia chose to focus on marketing the N8 and launching the C7, and saw fit to leave the launch of the E7 until this year.
While the UK was one of the first countries to get the N8, it fell down the packing order for its business equivalent. Nokia first announced the general availability of the E7 back in early February, and maybe the UK would have seen it soon after that, but Stephen Elop decided to stir things up once more by announcing future Nokia high-end smartphones would run on Windows Phone 7.
So over half a year after it was announced the UK will finally get its hands on the Nokia E7 - the Symbian ^3 smartphone with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard aimed at professional users. To be fair this kind of delay is not unprecedented for Nokia - the N8 was announced in April, but not available until October - but with everything that has happened since we'd almost forgotten about the E7.
Anyway, the E7 is now available for pre-order on the Nokia website for £499 SIM-free or ‘free' on a Vodafone £35 per month, two year contract. Our first impression is that this is pretty pricy for a phone whose main difference from the N8 appears to be the - albeit well-received - keyboard. Nokia itself is offering the N8 SIM-free for £365, and it's not at all clear how the E7 is worth the extra £134.
We shared these sentiments with Nokia and they stressed that, as well as a superior screen to the N8, there are a number of business-specific features. These include:
- USB-On-The-Go
- Adobe Reader
- Good Office and Exchange support
- Business-grade security solutions, including remote lock/wipe
- Cisco AnyConnect SSL VPN support
- IBM Lotus Mobile Connect
Regardless, given the current price of the N8 and the challenges Nokia faced selling Symbian phones even before the WP7 announcement, we'd expect this price to come down reasonably soon. We must note, however, that when we had a play with the E7 back at Nokia World it seemed like a decent piece of hardware. Here's how they made it.
