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Nokia E7 review: Internet
With its beautiful four-inch touchscreen, 3G and 802.11 b/g/n Wi-Fi capability, you'd think internet browsing would be a thing of joy on this machine. Sadly, this isn't so. It's a bit of a chore, actually.
The built-in Nokia browser doesn't automatically fit the page to the screen and is fairly slow to load perhaps due to the processing speed (680 MHz).
The capacitive touchscreen allows for pinch zooming and the quality of the pages on the screen are of passing crispness despite the fairly low 640 x 360 resolution, though it doesn't allow for zooming too far out and still being legible. Plus, when pinch zooming, the browser stutters often.
Flash Lite 4.0 is a welcome software inclusion, which also supports a majority of Flash 10.1 content, but pulling up the YouTube widget automatically takes you to the mobile site, means watching a tiny media player that doesn't fill the screen with patchy quality video when you do zoom in.
Streaming on the BBC iPlayer widget (which is essentially the mobile site) doesn't take too long to load, and stays a good quality when zoomed to full screen.
There's no text reflow, so get used to scrolling left and right if you need to zoom way in on the article you're reading.
Aside from the frustrating speed, the browser is clunky to navigate and if you're not a Nokia or Symbian user, may take a little trial and error to get you around the browser's features as they're not clearly marked.
It takes far too many interactions, for example, to reload or find the browser history, which is rubbish if you accidently pressed a button and need to go back quickly. That said, when you do find the history, the swipeable thumbnails are a nice touch.
Opera Mini is available to download for this handset. Funnily enough, it provides what Nokia can't in the form of a mini QWERTY touchpad in portrait mode. It's a little slower to load, if that's possible, than the built-in browser, but provides text reflow and a slightly-less-juddery zooming experience, so we'd use it over the E7's own browser if we were catching up on our news. Other than that, there's little to separate them.
