Due to be available towards the end of quarter three of this year, Nokia on Monday announced the successor to the highly popular E71 – the Nokia E72.

The Nokia E72 continues the design tradition of the E71 with a candy bar QWERTY keyboard. It also has essentially the same software elements albeit enhanced – s60 third edition feature pack 2. The new kid on the block builds on the success of its predecessor, while at the same time bringing a few new things to the table. The upgrade in my opinion is not in any way revolutionary, rather, it is an incremental one.

This latest E-series device comes equipped with a 5.0 megapixel auto-focus camera with LED flash, an upgrade from the 3.2 megapixel camera on the E71.

Nokia has implemented an optical Navi key (track pad) in the centre of the D-pad of the device for a more intuitive and animated scrolling in the menu. While this is new for Nokia E-series, the technology is not new as this has been implemented by Samsung on a few of their devices.

One of the new things that the E72 brings to the table is somewhat of a surprise. There’s now a chat application pre-installed called Ovi Chat that is integrated into the contacts application. What it means is that from the contact menu you can chat on Yahoo and GoogleTalk. This is highly welcome as there will be no need to install a third party application to do chat.

Another surprise that the E72 springs on us is the inclusion of the N-series style image and video gallery. I am truly happy about this as I hope that it marks the end of the old and boring image gallery that E-series owners have been subjected to in the past.

Nokia messaging is on-board out of the box, with support for multiple e-mail accounts. The interesting part is that there is a lifetime license for Nokia messaging on the E72. There is also a life-time license for Ovi Chat.

Other upgrades include a digital compass embedded in the map application, QuickOffice editing suite is now up from the 4.3 version to 5.3 with support for Microsoft office 2007.

Is the E72 a true upgrade from the one year old and very successful E71? While I was hoping for the Symbian foundation OS, I am of the opinion that the E72 has come to take the shine from the E71.

The Nokia E63 is the more affordable cousin of the E71. I picked up a unit today and decided to present my first impressions of this budget smartphone.

Unboxing the device quickly revealed why the phone is relatively inexpensive. In order to make it affordable, several essentials that we have come to expect in the sales package of Nokia’s smartphones – especially their enterprise devices – are conspicuously missing.

Missing in Action

First on the list is the software CD usually included in the sales package of Nokia’s smartphones. Now this came as a shock to me. Because this was the last thing I expected would be thrown out of the sales package. In case you don’t already have Nokia PC suite installed on your PC and you are considering buying the E63, you might need to borrow from someone else who has a copy.

Secondly, the USB data cable is also missing. In 2009, this is unforgivable, but then what do you expect from a smartphone in that price bracket? Something definitely got to give. Sigh!

Everything about the E63 is geared towards cost reduction. Everything. The top grade material used for the E71 was abandoned for a cheaper plasticky material. The E63′s casing is all plastic.

Continuing this cheap theme, there’s no volume key and no dedicated camera key.

Okay. Okay. This is not supposed to be a full fledged review of the phone. That will come after I have had enough time to playing with it.

Watch this space for the full review and possibly a comparative review between it and the E71.