Nokia E5 review

Lots of people carry two mobiles – one for work and one for leisure. Many would really rather have just one phone for all situations and as long as you don't need to have two separate numbers, then that is perfectly achievable. The trick is to find a handset that's designed equally well for both business and leisure, by having features such as a comfortable keyboard for typing emails quickly,as well as a good quality camera and integration with social networks.

Nokia has designed its E5 smartphone with dual home screens, a feature it hopes will help you achieve this work-life balance. However, the E5 is unlike the iPhone and Android smartphones which have home screens with multiple pages that allow you to organise your apps and widgets to suit you.

The E5 has a single home screen which can be configured with different sets of apps, shortcuts and widgets, as well as different wallpapers so you can tell them apart at a glance. You then switch between them using an on-screen shortcut.

For example, you could configure one screen to provide access to the Wi-Fi sniffer and email notifications when you're working, while the 'home' screen provides shortcuts to Facebook and Twitter updates when you are not.

The Nokia E5 has Wi-Fi, HSDPA. assisted GPS and Bluetooth - features which will appeal to both business and leisure users. A measly 256MB of storage is built in to the handset itself, but a 2GB microSD card is also included.

Most importantly, the keyboard is well constructed which is just as well. Since the screen isn't touch-sensitive, it's what you'll use to control the E5 with. The keys are large and give a satisfying amount of feedback when pressed. The all-important @ key sits to the right of the space bar. There’s a shortcut for turning Bluetooth on and off, which will please those who like to have an earpiece in for phone calls – or want to use stereo Bluetooth for music or listening to the built in FM radio.

Another useful shortcut is the space bar - press and hold it to turn the camera flash on or off. This allows it to easily double as a flashlight with resorting to an app.

Above the keyboard are the Call and End buttons as well as the two soft keys all of which lie flush with the casing. The long and thin Home and Messaging buttons stand out since they have a more raised profile. A short press on the Messaging button takes you to the main Messaging menu. A long press creates a new SMS message. Pressing the Home button takes you back to the home screen, but a long press activates the application switcher. All of these shortcuts work very well.

What we aren’t so happy about is the screen. As already mentioned, it is not touch sensitive. It doesn’t rotate as there is no accelerometer, so you are stuck with its landscape format. It is sharp and clear enough, but it only has a meagre resolution of 320 x 240 pixels.

This low resolution combined with its small size of 2.36 inches means it simply isn’t large enough for serious web browsing. This is a shame since the browser itself works well, since it's based on the same WebKit rendering engine as Apple's Safari browser and Google's Android Browser.

Partially making up for the lack of a multitouch screen, there are keyboard shortcuts for zooming in and out of individual web pages and an overview of a page which lets you manoeuvre a zoom box around so you can choose precisely what you want to focus on. Moving around within a page is done by using the very responsive D-pad which controls a tiny cursor that turns into a pointy finger when you pass it over a link.