The forgotten smartphone: Nokia E5 from 2010

January 17, 2022 Luisa Rey

Nokia has released a lot of devices in recent years. Many of them as real gems with many memories, such as the Nokia 1100, 3310, N95 and so on, and lesser known devices. We can put the Nokia E5 in the latter category. We discuss it in ‘The forgotten smartphone’.

Nokia E5

In 2010, Nokia released the Nokia E5; a smartphone with quite a few possibilities. Characteristic of the device was the BlackBerry-like design, with a full QWERTY keyboard under the display. This made typing your messages super fast. Characteristic was also the aluminum plate that sat between the screen and the keyboard. This contained the phone’s shortcut keys. This was to give the Nokia an extra luxurious look. The E5 ran on Symbian 9.3 Series 60 where you could download applications from the Ovi Store. For example, consider a chat app such as eBuddy for MSN.

The Nokia E5, also known in full as Nokia E5-00, was equipped with a 2.36 inch display with a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels. It was a TFT screen with a display of 256,000 colours. On the start screen you had a direct view of agenda items, emails and other information. We also saw a 600 MHz single-core processor, which was assisted by 256 MB of working memory. Fortunately, the internal memory, which was only 250MB, could be expanded with a memory card. For taking pictures, the Nokia E5 was equipped with a 5 megapixel camera. Filming was possible in VGA quality with a frame rate of 15 fps.

The E5 could handle the 3G network and also had WiFi on board. There was Bluetooth, GPS and an FM radio on board. Once the email account was set up, the emails appeared on the phone in real time. Furthermore, there was an editor on board for editing documents. You could of course download the rest from the Ovi Store. GPS was useful for navigation; the phone was equipped with Ovi Maps, the map service from Nokia that you could use to navigate from A to B.

Under the metal tailgate was a 1200 mAh battery. Below that was the slot for the memory card. Included with the Nokia E5 was a headset, data cable, charger and a 2GB memory card. At the time, we also saw a thicker manual than the paperwork that is still included.

The Nokia E5-00 was rated well in the reviews. The keyboard in particular was received positively. In the Netherlands, the phone was released for an amount of between 200 and 250 euros.