As we promised here is a comparison of Nokia’s thinnest smart phone to date and the arguably most popular Nokia E-Series device, the E71. We already mentioned one or two differences between the E71 and the E55 in the Hardware and Design post.
The major difference you will notice between those two devices is the screen and the keypad. The E71 has a 2.36-inch landscape screen while the E55 has a 2.4-inch portrait screen. Due to its portrait screen the E55 is much narrower than the E71. With a measure of 114 x 57 x 10 mm the E71 is wider and slightly thicker than the E55. But the E55 is a bit taller.
While the E71 features a full QWERTY keypad the E55 comes with a compact QWERTY. Therefore typing with the E71’s keypad should be easier than with the E55’s keypad. The full QWERTY keyboard seems to be a worthy sacrifice since without it the E55 would be much wider and not as much pocket able as it is now.
The E71 and the E55 use the same 1500 mAh battery namely the BP-4L. In the case of the E55 the battery is charged through the micro USB port which is very convenient. The E71 meanwhile has to fall back on its 2 mm charger connector. Even though both have the same battery the E55 has a much higher GSM standby time and WCDMA talk time. But the E71 wins in WCDMA standby time and GSM talk time.
Though I personally think there won’t be a big difference in battery life between those two phones once the E55 is on the market.
The cameras of both E-Series phones seem to be almost the same but there is a difference in the video recording department. While the E55 records videos in VGA resolution at 15fps the E71 records its videos in QVGA at 15fps.
There are also some other features that the E55 has which the E71 is missing like a dedicated camera key, Nokia’s mobile gaming platform N-Gage, a 3.5 mm audio jack and an accelerometer. However the latter wouldn’t make much sense in a device which natively has a landscape screen.
The E71 is powered by an ARM11 CPU clocked at 369 MHz while the E55 is powered by an ARM11 CPU clocked at 600 MHz.
Besides having a faster processor than the E71 the E55 comes also with a newer mobile operating system. The E55 is based on S60 3rd Edition FP2 while the E71 is based on S60 3rd Edition FP1.
It seems like the E55 excels in many areas compared to the E71 but if it will be as successful as the E71 is still hard to tell. We will know more when we can get our hands on a retail version of the E55.
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