Back in the day, phones were made for either business or pleasure, with no crossover between the two. But these days, even the most businesslike of phones require the fun features to make them all-purpose devices. This is what make Nokia’s E71 such a barnstormer, but unfortunately, the Nokia E72 doesn’t quite reach the same heady heights. Sure, it has Nokia Messaging and a touch-sensitive trackpad, but comes up short on the features that make a phone fun.

Style and handling for the Nokia E72

The Nokia E72 boasts the stylish looks we expect from Nokia smartphones, resembling a streamlined BlackBerry, and has a tactile QWERTY keyboard. It’s a busy fascia: between the 2.36-inch screen and keyboard is a dashboard of keys and a D-pad. The shortcut keys take you to home (or, if you do a long press, switch between apps), contacts, emails and calendar. There are the usual call and end keys, plus two hot keys, and the D-pad has an optical trackpad in the centre, like the BlackBerry Bold 9700.

It’s not as effective, though. Yes, it’s responsive and accurate, but surrounded as it is by the raised edges of the D-pad, you end up hitting the edges rather too often. There is also some confusion with the menu when the trackpad and D-pad have the same function. So trying to select something from the drop-down menu became almost impossible, as both scrolled through the list of options and selection was difficult.

Other than this, the user interface is as easy to navigate as most Nokia devices. On the home screen is a bar of shortcuts for functions including messaging, memos, clock and maps. Unfortunately it’s non-customisable, which means you can’t add favourite programs like Facebook or Chat like you can on BlackBerry devices.

The home screen also show you notifications of emails and appointments as well as Wi-Fi hotspots, and two home screens mean you can separate your business and social life neatly.

The Nokia E72 is packed full of connectivity and access goodies including Wi-Fi, HSDPA internet speeds, Bluetooth, GPS and a microSD card slot. And we’re mightily impressed with the battery life: it lasted for two days even with push-email, GPS and Wi-Fi running constantly.

Email on the Nokia E72

Nokia Messaging hasn’t been around for very long but it’s an excellent email interface that allows you push-email support on up to 10 accounts and a choice of how many you have on your home screen at any one time. We chose to put our Exchange email on our business screen and Gmail on our “social” screen, for example.

Nokia Messaging gives you a desktop-like email experience so you can view all your folders and manage your mail through a host of shortcuts. One of our favourite features is that you can press the right key on any email or contact number to save or contact it or on web addresses to get there directly.

The QWERTY keyboard is compact but alphabet keys double up as numbers and symbols and the common punctuation marks get their own keys, making messaging comfortable, quick and easy.

GPS on the Nokia E72

The A-GPS on the Nokia E72 is flawless. It located our position to an accuracy of around five feet which, considering that many devices promise you 500m accuracy, is not too shabby. Nokia Maps v3.0 is fully featured and includes the Explore option, which lists places of interest near your location and lets you plan multi-stop routes.

If you’re using it in your car, you can choose the dashboard view, which shows your GPS location, speed and altitude. A ten-day trial of Nokia Maps Premium gives you extras including live traffic information.

Social networking on the Nokia E72

The Nokia E72 is meant to be a business phone, but there are some consumer features in there too, so it’s only fair we test these out as well. Frankly, though, there’s no much to shout about. The Chat application is rather flat – it enables instant messaging through Gtalk and includes a couple of VoIP apps, but there’s no capacity for Windows Live Messenger. You can’t even download it from the Ovi Store, although there is an all-in-one IM programme available called Nimbuzz.

Incoming chats are pushed to your home screen, at least, which isn’t the case for the Facebook app – strange, as it was designed especially for the Nokia E71 and E72. It’s not well integrated at all, actually. Not only do you miss out on push notifications, but the app doesn’t even automatically update in the background. Every time you want to check your notifications you have to open the app and refresh the page.

Camera on the Nokia E72

The photo uploading service also leaves much to be desired. When you’ve taken a photo on the five-megapixel camera you have the option of sending it via email or MMS, both of which work well, or ‘sharing’ it. We would assume that this meant sharing the pic on the social network of your choice, but the only way we could do it was with Nokia Ovi.

The camera itself is pretty decent and includes auto-focus and an LED flash. The lens doesn’t compare with the fullness of the N86 8MP (which is, after all, a camera-centric device) but photos come out well in both daylight and low light with only slight overexposure when using the flash.

Ovi Suite itself was a little disappointing. For example, there is software for syncing your contacts with Outlook, but not your calendars. Really, it’s only useful for backing up your contacts and media files.

The verdict on the Nokia E72

The Nokia E72 is a lovely piece of hardware with some good business specs, but leaves a lot to be desired on the features front. If we could easily download an app for getting our Outlook calendars or photo sharing. It does have some of the best email features around, though, and the battery life is astounding.

Click Here To Buy the Nokia E72