Nokia’s upcoming Symbian^3 powered E7 has found itself on American shores in a laboratory awaiting certification by the FCC according to Engadget. The sucessor to the long in the tooth E90 is expected to start shipping next month, so it may or may not hit a store shelf near you in time for Christmas. Features include a 4 inch AMOLED CBD (Clear Black Display), which is just a fancy way of saying there’s a polarizer on the glass to make visibility in sunlight easier, full QWERTY keyboard, 8 megapixel camera with dual LED flash, support for all four GSM/EDGE bands, support for all five 3G bands, meaning you get high speed internet regardless of where you are on the planet, 16 GB of built in storage, Bluetooth 3.0, and HDMI out. It’s a hell of a phone, but something tells me it’s going to get the same acclaim that the Nokia N8 received. That is, people will fall in love with the hardware, the materials, everything that’s physical about the device, but then they’ll be in for a world of pain when they turn it on and enter the world that is Symbian^3.
Long time Symbian device owners will say that there’s nothing wrong with their out dated operating system, and that’s perfectly true. It’s only after I bit the apple from the tree of knowledge and started playing with other platforms that I realized the limits that my operating system of choice had. If this thing ran Android it would be absolutely killer, but nope, that’s not going to be the case.
In related news, the folks over at All About Symbian have discovered that Nokia has published the manual for the E7 on their website. They seem to be excited by hot keys, which admittedly make navigating a device easier … but that’s something a touch optimized UI should fix, rather than remembering which buttons to mash to reply to an email.