Nokia E52: A good-looking, highly capable mobile phone

MANILA, Philippines - I’ve never been the touch-screen or QWERTY keypad type of cellphone user. Call me old school, but I’ve always had a fondness for the traditional monoblock handset with a conventional numeric keypad.

Which is why the sleek (9.9-mm thin) and lightweight (98g) E52, in its metal gray aluminum glory, caught my eye. (A golden aluminum version is equally gorgeous.)

The whole device is splashed in various shades of business-like gray. A brushed metal background surrounds the D-pad and other shortcut buttons. The whole front of the phone is ringed by a polished metal accent while the rear plastic battery cover sports a very nice textured finish. The gray-colored keys are just the way I like them — large and well-spaced.

The quad-band E52, which retails for P17,580, runs on the S60 platform (ver 3.2), so any mid- to high-end Nokia user will be right at home using it. I particularly applaud the E52’s ultra-fast 600MHz processor that enables it to jump from one application to another as fast as your fingers can hit a key.

On the business side, the E52 has a Document Editor for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF files; HTML e-mail support; voice commands; a text-to-speech message reader; a digital mic; an organizer; a photo editor; Nokia Maps; voice memory; and an A-GPS digital compass.

The 3.2MP camera with LED flash and 4x digital zoom takes decent photos although video recording maxes out at a so-so VGA at 15 fps. It does have various modes for flash, white balance, light sensitivity, and color tone.

Connectivity is via Wi-Fi, EDGE, 3G, Bluetooth, and microUSB. Entertainment comes from stereo FM (with 3.5-mm audio jack) and N-Gage-compatibility.

It may be a business phone, but the E52’s music-playing capability is second to none. Its media player boasts an equalizer; shuffle/repeat functions; loudness on-off switch; stereo widening; music selection via artist, album or genre; and album graphics display.

The 60MB of onboard memory can be expanded via memory card slot that can take up to a gigantic 16GB microSD card.

Wish list? I have three: the otherwise brilliant auto-rotate (landscape/portrait) 16-million-color 2.4-inch screen could be bigger; the numeric keypad could have a firmer spring action for better control when speed texting; and the upper button of the D-pad (at least for my test unit) seemed much less responsive compared to the other three buttons. That’s it.

All things considered, Nokia’s E52 is one good-looking, highly capable, reasonably priced handset not just for E-series fans, but also for any mid-range phone user for that matter.