Most smartphones have one thing in common- poor battery life. On the majority of devices we test we’re lucky if we get two days worth of talk and browsing out of them. Nokia’s E52 has no new features to really get excited about, but it does feature something that we know a lot of businesspeople will be crazy about- decent battery life.

Looks
The E52 is a classic Nokia E-series device running the Series 60 platform. With a depth of just under 1 cm it comes dressed in Nokia’s regular business silver, so it’s both functional and elegant. We didn’t have any problems with the keypad, although the call-accept and -reject buttons are a little small. At 2.4" the screen is also adequate.
As a business device the E52 pretty much covers all the bases since it includes A-GPS, Wi-Fi connectivity, HSDPA and push-email capabilities. That said, it doesn’t include a QWERTY keyboard or touch-screen. But if you can live with using the regular alpha-numeric keypad to type emails then you should be fine.

Fast
A speedy 600 MHz processor makes the E52 run nice and smoothly. This is especially noticeable when dealing with the S60 interface and viewing media files. Once again we had no trouble setting up our Gmail, but struggled to get our usual POP3 mail account working properly. The lack of QWERTY keyboard is noticeable when dealing with mail, and if you are looking to deal with a lot mail you’re better off sticking with something like a BlackBerry.

Battery life
While the E52 makes all the right noises in regards to features, the device’s battery life was the one we enjoyed most. Not having to plug in a smartphone to charge overnight is a luxury that’s fairly uncommon these days. With fair usage of the web, email, a bit of GPS navigation and talk we managed about three and a half days without going for a recharge. Nokia reckons one should get six hours of talk time out of the device in 3G.

With a decent RRP of R3699 the E52 falls squarely in the entry-level smartphone range. For businesspeople looking for a return to longer battery life, without having to sacrifice on good looks and decent business features, the E52 should come as a blessing.