Nokia E55 review: Five by five

Music player: Symbian regular

Full-featured music ability is not supposed to make or break a business device but the music player of the Nokia E55 is still pretty decent and we set our hopes for good audio quality high when we saw that standard 3.5mm audio jack.

The lack of dedicated music keys is easily overcome by the smooth D-pad control. There is a huge number of audio formats supported including MP3, AAC, eAAC+ and WMA. M3U playlists are also managed seamlessly and transferred files are added to the music library trouble-free by choosing the refresh option.

The music player is pretty straightforward

Filtering tracks by artist, album, genre and composer is automatic and searching tracks by gradual typing is also available.

The player comes with five equalizer presets, bass booster and stereo widening effect. You can also create new equalizer presets if the preloaded ones won't do.

The available equalizer presets * creating a new one

Finally, being one of Nokia's best equipped phones, the Nokia E55 naturally also includes support for the A2DP Bluetooth profile, which allows listening to music on a Bluetooth stereo headset.

Decent video player

The Nokia E55 features Real player for playing your video clips. The video player works in portrait or fullscreen landscape mode. The softkey functions are hidden in full screen so they don't get in the way, and they only pop up when a key is pressed.

The E55 Video center * the video player has very few controls

The relatively big screen and the MP4 video clips support add up to a passable video watching experience but you will probably resort to another player anyway. The reason for this is quite simple - the E55 lacks DivX and XviD support out of the box. Luckily, finding applications for the S60 3.2 that support those codecs is a fairly easy task (though they can be paid).

FM radio with RDS

The Nokia E55 sports stereo FM radio with RDS, controlled by the well known radio app. Upon starting, the app asks about your location in order to set up the proper frequencies for your area.

The FM radio can automatically scan and save the available stations in your area. Scanning for alternative frequencies when traveling can also be set to automatic. You can save up to 50 radio stations and the option to play through the loudspeaker is available.

The FM radio app

Impressive audio quality

Unsurprisingly, the audio quality of the Nokia E55 is an a perfect match to that of the E52. The Finnish company has once again demonstrated that there is no reason why the users should be made to choose between business functionality or good audio .

We can safely say that the two most recent bar phones – E52 and E55 are the best performer in terms of audio quality that the Eseries have ever seen, overtaking even the E75. They have better frequency response, stereo crosstalk and distortion levels than their side-sliding sibling and that seems enough to us to announce it as the new Eseries lead-singer.

Cutting to the point - here go the results so you can see for yourselves.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Nokia E55	+0.05, -0.23	-83.6	83.3	0.013	0.033	-84.3
Nokia E52	+0.05, -0.22	-85.3	85.0	0.014	0.034	-85.4
Nokia E75	+0.11, -0.91	-91.6	91.4	0.012	0.462	-73.3
Nokia E63	+2.63, -2.38	-75.0	75.3	0.018	0.102	-74.9
Nokia E71	+0.74, -1.26	-74.5	74.7	0.016	0.097	-75.8
Nokia E66	+0.74, -0.84	-72.3	72.5	0.021	0.102	-72.9
Nokia N78	+0.30, -1.59	-76.1	76.1	0.014	0.548	-72.7
Nokia N81	+0.39, -1.13	-86.6	95.8	0.041	0.040	-69.9
Samsung i550	+0.74, -0.76	-90.8	86.9	0.0024	0.033	-89.1
Sony Ericsson W980	+0.31, -1.25	-86.0	89.4	0.037	0.828	-86.3
Apple iPhone 3GS	+0.01, -0.05	-92.1	92.1	0.0035	0.011	-95.0

Nokia E55 vs Apple iPhone 3GS frequency response graphs

You can find more info about the testing process here.