Smartphone showdown – Nokia E72 versus BlackBerry Bold 9700
We’ve got the Nokia E72 in one corner, the BlackBerry Bold 9700 in another – the battle for your QWERTY-based affections has never been so intense. Read on to find out which smartphone wins our showdown…
So we have the successor to the ultimate email warhorse, the BlackBerry Bold versus Espoo’s newest full-keyboard killer, both with workaholics set firmly in its sights. Let’s see how the stats stack up.
Screen
The Nokia E72 manages to squeeze a 2.36-inch number onto its slimline frame, with a 320×240 QVGA resolution. Great for trawling through endless emails and web pages, but not so for watching movies and TV shows when work’s all too much. The BlackBerry Bold 9700 packs in a slightly bigger 2.44-inch effort and pushes the resolution up to 480×360.
Winner: BlackBerry Bold 9700
Connectivity
We’re talking smartphone skills galore here, with both blowers packing in everything you could possibly need when your strutting through the City. The Nokia E72 packs in GSDPA for mobile browsing, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth for sharing deets on deals and the like. However, the BlackBerry Bold 9700 also manages all of these. A-GPS can be found on both phones, with BlackBerry Maps and Nokia Maps each sating your satnav needs.
Winner: Tie
Camera
These might be business blowers, but they still pack in snappers for when you’re not beavering away on spreadsheets and nursing your email addiction. The BlackBerry Bold 9700 comes with a 3.2 megapixel camera grafted onto the back, with auto focus and 2x digital zoom. However, the Nokia E72 packs a 5MP snapper, replete with 5x optical zoom, LED flash and one touch auto focus.
Winner: Nokia E72
Build
RIM has a habit of making hulking phones and while the BlackBerry Bold 9700 isn’t ugly, it’s certainly not slinky either. It tips the scales at 122g, but at 14.1mm, it’s not the thinnest cell you’ll ever use. The Nokia E72 weighs in at 128g, but at 10.1mm thin, it’s an altogether slicker package. The body feels rock solid and while it doesn’t come with the BlackBerry Bold 9700’s leather back, it still takes the title of best build.
Winner: Nokia E72
Software
Neither BlackBerry OS or Symbian S60 are the sexiest of operating systems. But that’s not to say the BlackBerry Bold 9700 and Nokia E72 aren’t easy to use. The Nokia’s breezy mail set up and work and play homescreens are a joy to use and will be familiar to S60 users everywhere. The BlackBerry’s OS is equally basic, although mail handling is superior, thanks to RIM’s email heritage. The browser remains a weak point on the Bold though. However, easy access to the BlackBerry App World gives it the edge.
Winner: BlackBerry Bold
Media
As well as taking care of all your workaday needs, both these phones are dab hands at multimedia extras. While neither has any major storage (each has 250MB of free space), there is microSD support. BlackBerry’s tie up with 7digital means easy over the air music access, while Nokia’s music software is also nifty. There’s a 3.5mm jack on both devices, so you can hook up any headphones you like.
Winner: Tie
Battery
Now here’s where the Nokia really wins out. The E-series is renowned for being epic when it comes to battery life and the Nokia E72 doesn’t disappoint. It serves up a colossal 12 hours of GSM talk time, compared to just six hours on the BlackBerry Bold 9700. Standby time is somewhat closer, with Nokia offering 492 hours compared to the BlackBerry’s 504.
Winner: Nokia E72
Overall winner: Nokia E72
We love both the Nokia E72 and BlackBerry Bold, but the Finnish phones monster battery life means it just sees off the challenger from Canada.
November 22nd, 2009 at 12:36 am
nice comparative
November 28th, 2009 at 6:44 am
Nice comparison, however I miss two important features that are not compared.
1. GPS or Navigation options. As far as I know, BB doens’t have any good turn-based navigation software, such as Tomtom or Garmin.
2. Browser. From what I understand, the BB series have a terrible browser. What’s the E72 like in that respect?
December 23rd, 2009 at 11:31 am
The E72 has HSDPA with speeds upto 10 mbps, the Bold 9700 upto 3 mbps. The E72 also has HSUPA, the Bold does not. If you are on the road alot, the HSDPA speeds of the E72 (depends were you are located), make a big difference when sending emails and navigating especialy when you have to send or recieve graphics. For me this alone and the fact that the E72 is made here in Europe, means the E72 wins handsdown
February 9th, 2010 at 12:49 am
A minor correction to Lorenzo’s review: The Bold 9700 is also made in Europe (Austria).
From experience, I didn’t like the Bold 9700 to start with, but it quickly grew on me and now I think it’s excellent. Especially as 3 have been doing them for £25/month on an 18 month contract with 200 mins, unlimited text and internet.
The browser isn’t great, but I’ve learned to adapt to it and it’s fine if you don’t intend to use it as your sole means of web access.
The screen is highly detailed and will show text at sizes I strain to read, but it’s easy to zoom in to read more clearly. The E72’s screen is a teensy bit smaller but noticeably less detailed. Bold 9700’s screen was easy to read outdoors in bright sunshine, the E72 struggled.
Bluetooth voice commands are excellent on the Bold 9700 and have been very accurate even in noisy environments (I don’t use a noise cancelling headset either). My direct experience of BT voice dialling on all recent Nokias, including the E72, has been a bit frustrating.
The Bold 9700 has outstanding call quality, those whom I call have said that I don’t sound like I’m on a mobile. The E72 wasn’t bad either, but the Bold 9700 was in a different league.
One other detail was that the Bold 9700 is supplied with a leather pocket holster which like all recent genuine Blackberry cases has a small magnet built in. As you slide the phone into and out of the holster it senses the magnet and activates/re-awakens from sleep mode. A small detail, but one of many small but often overlooked clever design features so typical of Blackberry designs.
The E72 has a radio and the SatNav software is better, especially now that Nokia have included free Nokia maps and SatNav for life. I don’t need the radio and I have a much better dedicated standalone SatNav, but both features are good and may be important to some users.
I also found more high quality apps for the Bold 9700 compared to the E72, but neither were blessed with a huge selection of apps. The E72 has far more farting apps if that’s your bag…
On balance, I liked them both, but for real-world usage the E72 just didn’t cut it as well as the Bold 9700. At the end of the day, if you want a BlackBerry then why buy a Blackberry wannabe especially when you’ll have to pay more on a longer contract?
February 9th, 2010 at 12:14 pm
Just re-reading my own comments above and would like to add the following:-
The E72 browser in my opinion was not even as good as the one on the Bold 9700, there was too much mucking about with side to side scrolling to read a complete webpage.
The E72 keyboard isn’t bad at all, but the Bold 9700 is easier to use due to the moulded raised ridges on the buttons. The E72 keys are much flatter and my fingers didn’t glide across the keys so easily.
The E72 has an additional front facing camera for video calling. If you need to make business video conference calls it may be a very desirable feature for you.
E72 allows you to fit a carrying lanyard (supplied), the Bold 9700 lacks any lanyard attachment points. This small point may be vital if you are worried about dropping your phone.
E72’s camera is horrible for anything other than web/MMS use. It’s the same one fitted to the 5800 and n79 and Nokia haven’t learned that more megapixels are only truly useful if the image processing hardware matches it. It really is no better at all in practical terms than the lower megapixel count on the Bold 9700 and is nowhere near as good as my six year old 2.1 MP Nikon compact (just for the record, 3MP is all anyone needs if printing to A4 size). Given that an image taken at 5MP has to be reduced in size if sending via MMS it’s just plain unnecessary although it’s a criticism I can level at many phones. But it looks good on paper when comparing specs which is probably all that mattered.
Battery life on the Bold 9700 is very good, but the E72 blows it out of the water. In practical terms this means that as a very heavy data, gps and Bluetooth user I was charging the Bold 9700 every other day, but on the E72 I got three whole days and would have gotten more had I not used it’s superior gps so extensively. It’s the difference between needing to pack a charger for a weekend away and being able to leave it at home.