Nokia raised the bar for stylish QWERTY smartphones with the E71 last year. Now, it’s time for the Finnish company to leapfrog its efforts. We managed to spend some time with the new E72 at the Nokia Connection event in Singapore last week and came away with some initial thoughts.

Upside

Unlike the iPhone 3GS which is an exact copy of the iPhone 3G, design-wise, there are several cosmetic differences between the new E72 and E71. You have a larger control panel with a touch-sensitive navigation pad smack in the center of the E72. Because of that, the chin at the bottom of the handset has shrunk by a few millimeters. Even though these changes are immediately noticeable if you put the two smartphones side-by-side, in use, it didn’t make a difference. That’s a good thing as we feel the E72 has a slightly more masculine look because of its stubbier chin. But that’s just us. The buttons on the E72′s keyboard are nearly indistinguishable from those on the E71, so users upgrading to the new device are unlikely to feel a difference, aside from the spacebar which is now narrower.

On the E71, the spacebar spans the length of four buttons. But on the E72, the spacebar has to make way for two additional keys. There’s now a dedicated Bluetooth/Symbols key. The “?” and “!” punctuations now have their own buttons mapped along with “(” and “)”. We noticed that the keystrokes for Chinese input are missing on the E72, which we’ll chalk up to a prototype unit. Holding down the Ctrl key also switches the phone to silent mode. Previously, we had to use the onscreen menus to do that.

Around the back of the E72, the camera and LED light modules have switched positions. We also noticed that there’s no self-portrait mirror on the E72. The 3.5mm audio jack (2.5mm on the E71) has been relocated from the side to the top of the E72. This makes a lot more sense so you won’t get an awkward protrusion on the side when the device is in your pocket. Onboard speakers have also been moved to rear of the E72.

Inside, the handset runs on the Symbian S60 operating system with Feature Pack 2. The menu icons and busy indicator now resemble those of Ovi. Time is also displayed permanently along the bottom edge of the screen. Other than that, we didn’t notice any significant changes to the user interface.

New features on the E72 include 250MB of built-in memory (vs. 110MB on the E71) with support for microSD cards up to 16GB, 10.2Mbps HSPDA (vs. 3.6Mbps on E71), 2Mbps HSUPA connectivity and a better battery life. The 600MHz processor on the E72 is also almost twice as fast on paper compared with 396MHz on the E71.

Both smartphones use batteries with 1,500mAh capacity, but the E72 has a rated talktime of 13 hours compared with 10.5 hours on the E71. It appears that the software has somewhat been optimized to be more energy-efficient. We’ll run more tests on this when we get a review unit of the E72.

Downside

Like we’ve mentioned in our recent review of the N97, the S60 software is starting to look dated compared with its competition and users are expecting more out of their devices. While we won’t say it’s a glaring negative for now, we do wish to see some innovation on the user interface.

Another aspect which Nokia constantly falls short on for its devices is video capture. The 5-megapixel camera on the E72 records motion images at VGA resolution in 15fps mode. Although this would have been sufficient for a business-oriented smartphone, we don’t think it’s too much to ask for a bump up to 30fps. That said, this is still an improvement over the E71 with its QVGA video resolution at 15fps.

Outlook

The question on everyone’s mind now would be: Is the E72 worth upgrading to if one already owns the E71? Two things to answer that: The 3.5mm audio jack and 5-megapixel camera. We haven’t tested the latter yet, but if the shooter gives us better picture quality, it would add to one of the main reasons to get the E72 when it ships next quarter in black, grey or brown. We’ll have a final review once we get a test unit.