September 22nd, 2008
Review: The Nokia E71 is a tough device to beat
It has been over 2 months since I wrote up my first impressions of the Nokia E71. At that time I was getting flooded with review and purchased devices such as the Palm Treo Pro, Samsung OMNIA, Touch Diamond, Treo 800w, MWg Zinc II, iPhone 3G and loads of applications with iPhone 2.0, Touch Diamond updates, and the iPAQ 910. Most of those devices are gone now, but the one that keeps earning the honor of carrying my AT&T SIM card is the Nokia E71. The fantastic hardware, valuable notifications on the standby screen, outstanding 3rd party application support, and form factor keep it in my pocket most of the time.
The device I took you on a tour around before was a European version and since that time I picked up the North American version that supports 3G on AT&T’s network. The hardware is the exact same as I detailed before, with the exception of the internal radio now supporting the U.S. bands so I won’t go over the hardware again. I will say what I keep on saying to everyone that I talk to about the device, the hardware ROCKS!
Looks and feel: The E71 is targeted to the enterprise user and as soon as you pull the device out of the box you realize this is one classy and professional device with the sleek stainless steel and dense body. The front facing QWERTY keyboard challenges the BlackBerry and the business user who have Exchange should be pleased with the device. The E71 is one of the first Eseries devices that no longer supports the BlackBerry Connect functionality, which some people may understandably miss. I use an Exchange service and have been using RoadSync because it provides an advanced Exchange experience compared to the free Nokia Mail For Exchange utility (for example, better folder support).
I did notice there is more light present between the display and keyboard than there was on the European version and haven’t seen folks mention this on the forums so I think this is just a slight device flaw that is not present across the line.
Keyboard: The keyboard is surprisingly very good and I actually like it better than my BlackBerry Curve for the most part because the keys feel more solid and smooth (the Curve buttons are hard and a bit loose) and I rarely enter text I didn’t intend to enter. I love that there is a button for the @ character, comma, period, and question mark that do not require any press of a FN button like they do on my Curve. Unfortunately, Nokia hasn’t fully embraced the keyboard into the device since there are very few shortcuts that you can perform on your device and most shortcuts are application specific. For example, did you see the TON of fantastic shortcuts I listed in my Nokia Email service post I would like to see Nokia integrate these types of shortcuts throughout the system and applications.
Standby screen and notifications: The standby screen has gone through a major overhaul and one of my favorite features of the Nokia E71 is the usage of notifications. These notifications can be selected by going to Tools>Settings>General>Personalization>Home Screen>Mode Settings>Home screen applications>Enabled applications. Wow, talk about some hidden settings, huh? You can choose to toggle the notifications and selected applications you desire to see appear. I have missed calls, voicemail, and text messaging notifications appear along the bottom of the display, along with Nokia Email and RoadSync email notifications/email subjects appearing on the standby screen with the music player, organizer, and wireless LAN utilities. Where Nokia went even further than a simple notification is with the way you can interact with that notification upon receipt. For example, when a missed call notification appears you simply select it with the directional pad and then move the pad to the right to then see all of your available options for intereacting with that person, including send SMS, send MMS, send email, and more. These same type of actions can be taken when you receive text messages. Unfortunately, Nokia hasn’t yet joined the Palm, iPhone, and Windows Mobile bandwagon of threaded SMS and needs to get on board soon. They did post the Conversations utility on the Nokia Beta Labs site so I hope they continue by including it in the OS.
PIM: I think the PIM (calendar, contacts, tasks, notes) functionality on S60 overall needs some serious improvements and I know that Nokia can do it and knows what they need to fix because they have made some improvements in the E71. The month view in the calendar is very useful in the layout it offers. You can quickly move to any day and the appointments/details for that day will appear on the right. If you have more entries than fit on the display then they dynamically scroll up and down so you can view them all. The new meeting entry screen is much easier to quickly enter an appointment. Custom recurrence is not supported though and with my sports practices I like to enter things like Tuesdays and Thursdays each week, which is not supported on the E71. You can easily select a day with the center action button, scroll up/down to a time and then press the center action button again to set a meeting, memo, anniversary, or to do for that time block.
GPS experiences: After returning my iPhone 3G, I then went to using my E71 GPS receiver with Google Maps and Nokia Maps to get around. When I was in Singapore I downloaded the Nokia Maps for Singapore onto my PC and then onto my E71 to navigate around the country and it worked very well. I see it pick up GPS satellites and get a fix within about 10-15 seconds and I have been very happy with the GPS functionality. I haven’t tried any voice navigation on it since my needs generally don’t require that much assistance.
Multimedia experiences: One of my main uses for S60 devices is the Nokia Podcasting application (a podcatcher) since it allows me to subscribe to and wirelessly download podcasts right to my device. I can be found listening to podcasts in the morning and evening while on the Sounder train and hated that I could only stream podcasts on the iPhone 3G (come on Apple get it together). Windows Mobile also needs to integrate this functionality into their devices, although I have recently found that the Samsung OMNIA has a utility for this and there are some RSS readers that support this. I download podcasts and then connect the E71 to the Nokia BH-903 A2DP headphones and listen for a couple hours a day without ever hearing my podcast skip on the headphones.
While the camera is 3.2 megapixel, I think it only does a fair job capturing images and is definitely not a strong point emphasized by Nokia. Images appear with a purple tint and some of these issues may be fixed by a software update. However, it does a good enough job to get by for simple cameraphone shots, but I like to see a better camera on my devices. A Carl Zeiss 3.2 megapixel camera would have been a super choice.
I only tested out the loaded default videos and the ones that I shot with the E71, but they played back very well and the single speaker is quite loud. I haven’t yet tried converting videos to Nokia format since my main media PC at home crashed and all my test videos are locked on it for now.
The OS does support YouTube video without any special application (i.e. right from the web browser) and I found that YouTube videos played pretty smoothly. You simply select the video and the onboard RealPlayer starts up to let you play the video. You can then choose to save the link to the video on your device or memory card for later viewing.
Matthew Miller is an avid mobile device enthusiast who works during the day as a professional naval architect in Seattle. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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