The Nokia E72, the followup to last year’s E71 sleeper hit, has gone on sale here for S$750 (without any subscription contract).

Featuring the same large screen + Qwerty keyboard layout in a skinny frame, this will likely be a hit with the Blackberry crowd as well as existing E71 users looking to upgrade to a new phone that’s sans touch-screen .

What we like most: 10.2Mbps 3.5G downloads – great for downloading those huge attachments or when surfing the Net for football scores, of course. Other useful features: an optical navi key, as well as a decent 5-meg camera (not bad for a “business” phone).

Of course, going with Nokia means you have to live with the Symbian OS, which is a plus to some but minus to others (mostly Android fans like me).

Still, outside of Blackberry, there were not many phones that did mobile messaging better than the original E71 last year. The E72, with some new components under the hood, should appeal to the same group of heavy messaging users.

Techgoondu on BlackBerry Storm

A touchscreen with a tactile keypress. That’s probably the most strikingly unique feature about RIM’s first touchscreen device – the BlackBerry Storm … aka its 9500 series.

The concept of its “SurePress” touchscreen certainly sounds good … on the screen – a capacitive touchscreen that you can not only tap, double tap, flick and drag your finger on, but also click on.

Click on a screen? Hmm. But will it make typing faster and easier?

While the idea of a clickable touchscreen sounds great, in reality, it didn’t quite click with me. The touch and tap aspects of the screen were great – you could highlight, copy and paste, swipe your finger to scroll etc. But when it came to typing, which I’d imagine you’d do a lot of on a messaging-centric device like a BlackBerry, that’s when the idea of a clicking screen started to come apart. First, it takes some effort to click the screen – more so than needed for a light tap on the touchscreen. And closer to the edges of the screen, the clicks needed even more effort. Will it have worked better if the screen required less effort to click? I think not.

Nokia E75 - push mail is easy

I met up with the Nokia folks recently and got my hands on the upcoming Nokia E75 messaging phone, which we wrote about at its launch in February 2009.

Let’s start by saying this ain’t your average slim phone. In fact, placed next to my HTC Touch Diamond, it is much thicker and bulkier. But that’s not exactly the best comparison, as you’ll see soon after getting a feel of it for the first time.

If I hadn’t told you this was a phone with a slide-out keyboard, you might just be fooled. Now, if you consider that a full-sized Qwerty is hidden in that shiny frame, would you still consider this a thick, ugly phone?

Nope, I didn’t think so. It’s actually pretty small for a device with so much packed in.

The BlackBerry Curve 8900 was launched in Hong Kong earlier this week. So it’s touted as the “thinnest and lightest full-QWERTY BlackBerry”. OK, next. What’s really whipping up a bigger … er .. storm and much more eagerly anticipated is the touchscreen BlackBerry Storm.

BlackBerry Storm (Image Source: Research In Motion)

While it’s not yet officially launched here, parallel import versions of the Storm (some which are Vodafone labelled) are surfacing at about HK$4,000 or less. Just do a Hong Kong Yahoo Auctions search for it here. Or if you’re here, go check it out at the (in)famous cellphone/computer malls.

I’ve only managed to have a cursory touch and feel of the Storm which belongs to one of my colleagues and my initial immediate impression was that it really had some weight, and it feels kinda chunky. Specs put it at 155g – the iPhone 3G weighs in at 133g so that explains it.

Its much talked about ‘tactile’ touchscreen does indeed seem to work pretty well and the big, bright 3.25 inch screen should make it THE multimedia BlackBerry. And they thoughtfully included a ‘normal’ 3.5mm audio jack.

But since unlimited data here still ain’t cheap, I think its lack of Wi-Fi will leave it in the hands of folks who have their companies pay for their unlimited data BlackBerry lines.