Why do custom agents always ask whether you’re travelling for business or pleasure? The Nokia E55 handles both with aplomb, breezing through emails and texts with its compact Qwerty keyboard while boasting the latest multimedia capabilities, A-GPS and N-Gage gaming talents. The 10mm-thin aluminium shell is elegant and practical, with a 2.4-inch QVGA screen that senses its orientation automatically.
Checking your email, whether via Nokia Messaging, Ovi Mail, Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange, is simplicity itself and it’s easy to sync or back up contacts and calendar items to the Ovi Contacts & Calendar service. Wi-Fi savvy, it lets you share media with home servers and the E55’s high-speed HSDPA connection can be shared with your laptop – should you even need one after sampling the range of apps available for this S60 smartphone from the Ovi Store. Battery life on standby should last the length of your business trip (well, as long as it’s under three weeks).
We say
They say
“Overall the phone feels on par with quality of the E71, though lighter and smaller, and is insanely pocketable”
Paul Miller, Engadget
If you only do one thing
Let your fingers do the talking via the precise, easy to use Qwerty keyboard. The Nokia E55’s advanced natural language system predicts text, corrects errors and learns new words as you type – you’ll soon wonder how you ever stayed in touch on the move without it.
Miscellany
- Mobile phones without the E55’s full QWERTY keyboard use the number pad and a predictive text system to compose words. Some combinations of key presses can generate multiple possible words, such as 2665 giving both ‘book’ and ‘cool’, or 7468 meaning ‘pint’, ‘shot’ or ‘riot’. These words are known as textonyms or paragrams, and have been adopted by some teenagers as slang in themselves.
- The celebratory exclamation ‘woohoo!’, for instance, is replaced by the mysterious ‘zonino’ – a word that appears to have no meaning outside predictive text dictionaries.
- Despite always managing to sneak into messages at the most inopportune moment, analysis has shown that textonyms are actually quite rare – around 87 percent of 80,000 common words are the only result of their key sequence.