I recently purchased the new Nokia E7. The reason being that I had worn out my previous Nokia E72, which did pretty well until it started playing around with me; white screens, hard to restart, sync problems just to mention a few. The phone comes in a variety of colours and I gave blue a go. The phone out of the box feels like good quality; heavier than its counterparts and the qwerty design seems pretty solid.

The slide function is very good but in my mind a little bit too "strong". The should have implemented some kind of mechanical solution. If you have a broken hand you won't be able to access the keyboard unless you're really skilled. The tilt of the screen and access to the keyboard are really nice though and people used to the small keyboard on the E72, will be really happy with the new layout and size of the keys.

The software on the other hand lacks tremendously. The software is not only slow, but has bugs that may require a restart of the phone to get rid of. I ran into a lot of problems with screens locking up and menus not working, it was fixed by restarting the phone though.

While calling you may accidentally disconnect the call or enable the speaker as the sensor is not working properly.

The camera is an 8mp camera, but the picture quality is not better than the E72. The camera seems to have problems adjusting proper to the light etc. and many of my pictures were either out of focus or full of "snow".

Navigation has been updated and the maps look great on the large screen. I'd be tempted to say that the maps are better displayed on the E7 than in our Buick Regal GS. The only problem is that you can't transfer your favourites from your old Nokia Phone as goes for your maps that you will have to re-download. The download of maps is complicated and the download often freezes or fails. I tried to access the OVI Map Server directly and with VPN and there was no difference in download speed nor the ability to finish a download.

I have lots of problems connecting to WLAN. I tried with two different wireless routers and the phone basically lost the connection within a few seconds of connecting. This could of course be a flaw in the phone or the software.

Battery; well this is an entirely different story. My phone has an average of 24 hours even without using it as a phone. I shut down all programs, even Blue Tooth and Wireless detection, but the battery still runs out within 24 hours. The only applications I have running is mail and the screen clock.

Final judgement: would I buy another one for my wife? Probably not.

Specs:

Operating system: Symbian 3 (wonder why they went for that)
Screen: 4" AMOLed (16:9)
Dimensions: 123.7 x 62.4 x 13.6 mm
Memory: 16 GB (32 GB to be released soon)
Camera 8mp with 720 HD
Network: Blue Tooth, WiFi, GSM/EDGE, WCDMA
Segment: Business

Pros
HDMI recording (720p)
HDMI out
Screen
Solid design
Homescreens
Anti Theft Software

Cons
No memory upgrade possible
Difficult if not impossible to replace battery
A little heavy
Slow and poor quality software
Camera