Hands on with the Nokia E55 smartphone

Nokia E55

Nokia E55

Nokia E55

At the Nokia booth at the 2009 Mobile World Congress this week, we were able to spend a few minutes giving the new super-thin Nokia E55 a once-over. This smartphone is powered by Nokia's S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 user interface and is the first Nokia cell phone to feature a 20-key near-QWERTY keyboard.

The hardware design of the Nokia E55 is spot-on. It's built well, and felt rock solid in our hand. However, the front keys are not very well defined, which led to some confusion when trying to use them. The keys do, however, offer a nice tactile 'click', which should definitely help. The phone also sports a 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash, and we're pleased to see a standard 3.5mm audio port on board, as well.

We found the software on the Nokia E55 to be extremely snappy, thanks in part to the new 600MHz Arm-11 processor inside. Nokia's S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2 interface also includes some very nice transitions that really enhance the whole experience. We were also pleased to see that the dedicated camera button on the side of the phone activates the camera, in addition to snapping the photo.

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Nokia E55

Nokia E55

Nokia E55