"Yes, we can!" might be the answer from Nokia. As you might have read my early reviews, the E71 is -- from my point of view -- the best device Nokia every made for business user. So, question is: How can you improve such a device?

Well, first of all keep all the "good" features: solid material, great design, impressive uptime, very convenient management of communication (email etc.) and awesome keyboard. So where is place for improvement? Well, there is like place, but let's head for that one.

• At first there is the camera of the E71. That one definitely is not state-of-the-art in 2009. So Nokia decided to head for a 5 Mpix Sensor with auto focus and on-chip image processing feature for different operation modes. This gives you a nice opportunity to take great pictures with your new E72 business phone.
• Secondly the E72 comes with a 3,5 mm audio plug. This is one of the features I loved most from the 5800. Simply take the headphones you like or simply connect your phone to your stereo with an ordinary audio cable. I can even connect my AKG headphone to my phone now - great!
• To most impressive innovation is the optical Navi(tm)-pad. It allows simple navigation and scrolling without pressing buttons. Simply move your finger over the sensor to navigate on your device. Very very nice.

All together: Good Job Nokia! The E72 is definitely a worthy successor of the E71.

Link: Nokia E72

I recently came along several research resports, executive summarys and management consultants presentations dealing with NFC. The authors tend to take the content of this blog (text and pictures) 1:1 into their reports/presentations (actually including typos ;-) and they charge customers lot of money for "their" research and "their" work. I think everyone knows today about copyright law -- doing such things is simply not allowed.

Therefore: If you would like to use material (text or pictures) from this blog for commercial reasons or publication puropose, you do require my permission. (Just send me a message thru Forum Nokia or gerald.madmayr - AT - gmx.at).

Of course, you always have asked yourself. "Where did the put the antenna in those NFC Phones?" -- So, after opening serveral devices, here are a couple of pictures, which illustrate where manufacturer put the antenna of their NFC Devices. After opening the devices, they have been put togehter again and are of course working. Thanks to Michael Roland for his Efford in this case!

Nokia 3220

The Nokia 3220 host the NFC Functionality in the external Shell. On the PCB you can cleary see the antenna at the edge. The Antenna is very close the reference design for an ISO 14443 reader/writer device.

Nokia 6131

Nokia's 6131 is probalby the best know NFC device yet. The antenna design itself is quite special and especially dedicated to touch-interacts. But as there is no touchmark on the device itself, it might be a bit tricky for a user to know, how to put two NFC devices together to establish a communcation.

Sagem X700n

Sagem's devices is using the 2nd version of the SWP protocoll for the communcation with the UICC. The device is make for emulation as well as reading/writing Type-B Task. P2P is not implemented yet. Like Nokia's 3220, the antenna is in the backside of phone in the cover for the battery.

Nokia 6212

Nokia's most recent NFC device came up with a new approach for the antenna design. In this case, the antenna is integrated into the body of the phone. This design allows to establish communication with other NFC devices without requiering a special touch area. A backdraft of this design is the case, that there are problems when reading smaller tags. Nokia announced that this issue will be fixed in the upcoming 6216.

Benq T80

The Benq T80 come with a secure Element on a micro-SD Card. The Benq has an antenna inside the battery-cover, which is protected by a fero-magnetic shield. The Antenna has the size of the reference antenna as in the Nokia 3220 and is connected thru a two-pin connector with the body of the device.