Nokia E71 – A Detailed Look
I recently went ahead and bought a Nokia E71 even though I wanted something without camera. I just could not wait for something to come along since my phone was not exactly in great shape. I have been using Nokia 6030 for a really long time now and I must tell you a jump from a S40 first edition phone to an S60 3rd edition phone is that simple.
Compare my phones:
Choice of Color:
Many do assume that white looks a lot better on E71 than grey steel does but let me tell you, I tried the white one and really it did not feel good. I personally hated how white the keypad was. The keys look damn weird. It was just plain too white. When I went to buy I knew I was going to buy white but when I held the white one in my hand I knew why people preferred the grey steel one. If the white one had a little less whitey keypad then I would have been total game for it. If you are a prospective buyer of Nokia E71 and want to buy the white steel version, please take the advice and first see it for yourselves and don’t go by the pictures. Pictures look awesome but the real thing is a different story. If you are a dude then by general perspective you can never like the white. But if you are a girl its different, though I will still not recommend it but girls may like the white one more than the grey steel one. It has that cute feeling to it and yeah it also has a white leather cover with it with a velvety red interior. It has a red power button which is uncommon for phone but I had read somewhere the red was used to show power which is what a corporate user will want people to think.
First look:
I will not start talking crap how awesome the steel body is and all which it is actually. Other than that since my shift was from a really small screen phone to a big one made the screen feel hell big. It is 2.38 inches but I have to say it feels small sometimes. I know the size was restricted because Nokia wanted to make the dimensions of the phone sleek but really they should have given full 2.4 inches or 2.5 inches for the screen. But I am happy with the present screen size it can rival many PMPs. When you switch it on first you will realize that the screen looks fabulous. The icons are placed nicely and all other goodness. The menus are fast if you use the home button rather than the shortcut menu button which will take time to open menu since its also used to lock the phone. Most of the features on this phone are pretty much straightforward and nothing difficult to use. The keypad however is a totally different ballgame. “It lasts long really long” – guess that line is from duracell and I guess they meant Nokia E71. It drops to only 3 bars after using it for 3 days on medium usage. The charger that comes with it is brilliant and charges it damn quickly. Its the best when you have to leave in an hour and your phone doesn’t have charge, the charger becomes the life saver then.
QWERTY Keypad:
Personally one of my main reasons to buy Nokia E71 was the QWERTY keypad . I just have a feeling that it will be better to own a phone that has a QWERTY keypad than a normal one. I don’t know if that is correct or not but it does fit my need. I have been using the phone for some 2-3 weeks now and have got very used to the the QWERTY keypad. But the QWERTY keypad sucks without the predictive text that you have on this phone. Predictive text makes everyones life easy. Just because I use predictive text my speeds are much faster sometimes 2x faster. The reason is that predictive text corrects your mistakes if you have typed a wrong spelling or left out a letter in a word and it also predicts the word you are typing for you. This eliminates lots and really lots of errors when you are typing. Its ideal for a really long email. Vaibhav Sharma of thesymbianblog has a nice post that details his comparision of text typing speed on 3 phones including Nokia E71. But I have to say I miss typing without looking at the keypad. Since I am a college guy,I tend to use it under benches sometime but its hell difficult to do that with this phone. You can’t type without looking at the keypad how much ever you get used to it. Then there is this cool thing where when you press the Fn button twice it stays pressed and you dont have to bother about it. It helps in fast number typing or copying and pasting which generally require 3 key combinations. There are a lot of shortcuts that were being discussed on the all about symbian forums.
Applications:
Installing applications on the phone is easy as pie as it is with any S60 phone. The apps are truly fast and so are the apps that come with it. I still haven’t got a proper chance of testing the Nokia Sports Tracker but I hope to do that soon. The game that they provide with the phone is kind of cool but I realized that the phone is not meant for games when I saw how sad the graphics of the games look. Opera mini is like a dream come true on the phone specially in full screen mode and smallest possible fonts. Even though it has its own great Nokia Maps I have a reason not to like it which I will explain later. With the amount of RAM this thing has and the processing power it packs it can run anything that also simultaneously. It is able to handle apps open simultaneously without much hiccups. There is a problem though whatever app or folder you assign to the left soft key makes accessing it a bit slow by pressing that key. Do remember to change it to something sensible from menu once you have it since its dumb to have 2 menu buttons. I don’t use the barcode scanner but I think some other 3rd party app might do a better job. The GPS is more or less waste on this in a city without using A-GPS that is. It can barely get a lock on the position and India not all cities heck not even all states have proper maps.
Multimedia & Web:
Yes its a business phone. Yes it sucks in music department. Yes it’s not the phones fault. The phone has a 2.5mm audio jack that makes it incompatible with any normal headphones and the ones that are provided with the phone are as good as having none. The headphones that come in the box are a waste, my left ear plug(I guess thats what its called) keeps falling for absolutely no reason. The sound that comes from them is just noise when compared to my Creative EP-630, which is one cool in-earphone. I am going to buy a 2.5mm to 3.5mm converter this weekend or next weekend before I leave on a trip so that I can use it on my trip as a PMP. The built in Real Player plays a limited set of files and you have to get a 3rd party video player if you really want to exploit the awesome screen. I would recommend encoding files specially for the phones screen size that is 320×240 since that will give you nice clarity while viewing it. The music player is same as the ones you find in the N series phone so there is absolutely nothing wrong with it. It works well sorts the songs in different categories and you can refresh it to add new songs that you have stored into your memory card. The 2GB memory card is good for first month but then you need more space, better get 8GB microSD card since the costs have gone down and it costs approx. Rs.1500($30.60). When it comes to browsing then the phone is a killer. You can’t compare it to iPhone in terms of its screen size but it definitely is awesome to browse with. The default browser which is called Nokia Maps browser is awesome and I didnt find any problems with it except the fact that it dies after 20 or so seconds of being online on a wifi connection. I am not sure if its a problem with my phone alone (or just the fact that I was browsing net on an ad-hoc connection I built with the wifi enabled laptop). But Opera Mini does most of the work on my phone anyways. I like it more than the default web browser anyways. I am not going to bitch about the camera which is bad but my only problem is that we cant take pictures with the front facing camera. Its only for video calls.
Conclusion:
The phone is definitely feature rich. There are times when you feel restricted on some of its capabilities but that’s just how the phone was meant to be. I even ended up endurance testing it once when there was a call and I tried to play a video which stuck the phone and I had to restart it by taking of the battery. Another time I had to hard reset the phone after I ended up installing some 11 or so themes and tried them all one after another. Now I am not sure if it was the themes or SkyFire browser. Other than this the phone has never had a problem in handling almost anything. The body is tough enough to handle falls which I am never going to test most probably and the leather cover that comes with this makes a style statement of its own. Anyone who is going to buy this phone needs to get two more things. They are:
- A nice fibre cloth to clean the phone
- 8GB MicroSD card.
- 2.5mm to 3.5mm audio jack converter.
Unboxing:
Yeah normally unboxing pics are first but I really didnt want to put it first. You can just follow the link on this image and view other pictures too.
November 1st, 2008 at 11:03 pm
Nice review man. I remember I was doing a P1i vs a E71 tweet cast.. should’ve hashtagged them!
Man you can’t enable T9 on the Qwerty ? For sure ? My P1i has T9 on Qwerty, and its a absolute BLISS! and yea the P1i definitely beats the E71 wrt Camera and Multimedia capablilities. The Battery backup of E71 is phenomenal though, from what you mention, the P1i battery is pretty weak. Nice review anyway!
November 2nd, 2008 at 12:22 am
Cant deny that there are many places where P1i can beat E71 not only T9 but also auto completing the sentences and stuff. Camera and Multimedia capabilities are sad too. But its a nokia phone so camera gets fixed only after 2nd or 3rd FW update.
Out of the box its not good for multimedia but with good apps and a nice 2.5mm to 3.5mm converter its all good.