Today Nokia announced the latest addition to their business mobile phone lineup. True to its Eseries nature, the Nokia E52 sports a decent feature set, extensive connectivity and a classic metallic design.

Nokia E52 is basically a copy of the Nokia E55, save for the QW-ER-TY keyboard. It brings 3G with HSDPA 10.2 Mbps and HSUPA 2Mbps support. The other major features of the Nokia E52 include a 2.4” display, GPS and Wi-Fi. An accelerometer sensor for automatic screen rotation, a digital compass and a 3 megapixel full focus camera are also on board.

The 8 hours of talk time and 23 days of standby are the other assets of the E52. Those numbers are just about the same as on the Nokia E55 and twice as good as its predecessor – the E51.

The Nokia E52 will ship with a 1GB microSD card and a free 60 day trial for Files on Ovi. It’ll become available in the second half of the year at an estimated retail price of €245, before taxes or subsidies. That is about 20 euro less than the Nokia E55 to compensate for the missing QW-ER-TY which might be a good trade-off for some users.

Here is a quick hands-on video, courtesy of Nokia conversations for you to enjoy. Just remember to click the HD button, once you start the playback.

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One of the most popular handsets in the world - Nokia 1100 has found itself in the middle of a banking fraud scandal, according to a Dutch investigator. Allegedly, criminals are paying an arm and a leg for working second hand units of the once-50-euro handset that are manufactured in Nokia plant in Bochum, Germany.

Investigators are observing huge amounts of money being offered for the outdated handset recently. The largest recorded sum up to now is 25,000 euro (about 32,000 US dollars), which is about 11 times its weight in gold. According to the investigators the criminals are looking to acquire only units that are manufactured in the Bochum plant of the company.

The supposed reason behind this peculiar requirement is that those handset most probably come with flawed software or hardware, which allows them to be hacked and used to make a working copy of someone else's phone line.

When set up this way, the Nokia 1100 receives the same calls and most importantly text messages that the original recipient gets, without them ever suspecting anything.

The loophole that the criminals are allegedly using is that many European banks now send temporary transaction authentication numbers or mTANs as SMS to the account holders as a security feature for authorizing online money transfers.

This is where the supposedly counterfeit-capable Nokia 1100 handsets step in. As they receive the SMS intended for the authorized account holder, criminals can acquire a working mTAN and initiate a transfer after they have stolen the needed online ID credentials in some other way.

At this stage Nokia have refuted those accusations claiming that they have not identified any flaw or wormhole in their phone software that would allow the alleged use cases.

However, the investigations still continue.

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