Review: Nokia E71 - The QWERTY Warrior

[KuRsEd]

Review: Nokia E71
By: Abdullah 'Kursed' Saad

Now, I am not a proper reviewer by any stretch of imagination, so bear with me while I give my opinion about this kit of outlandish beauty and keep your expectations low. Following my upgrade from Apple iPhone, the Nokia E71 seems to have it all. It feels much slimmer (and thus much more pocket-friendly), more powerful and a whole lot more function heavy. This is my second QWERTY equipped cell phone, after a brief (4 month) stint with Dopod 730W and so far it has managed to simply amaze me with its abilities.

[Features] [Unboxing] [Review] [E71 Camera shots] [Conclusion]

Key hardware features:

• Quad-band GSM support
• 3G with HSDPA 3.6Mbps support
• Landscape 2.36" 16M color display of QVGA resolution
• Comfortable full QWERTY keypad
• Conveniently placed shortcut keys
• 369 MHz ARM 11 CPU and 128 MB of SDRAM
• Wi-Fi
• Built-in GPS receiver, A-GPS
• 3.15 megapixel auto focus camera with LED flash
• 110 MB of internal memory, microSD expansion, ships with a 2GB card
• Slimmest smartphone to-date, slimmest Wi-Fi and/or GPS handset to-date
• Stainless steel casing
• Standard 2.5mm audio jack
• Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP support
• FM radio
• Infrared port
• Great battery life

Key software features:

• Symbian 9.2 OS, S60 UI with FP1 (topped with some FP2 goodies)
• Remote Wipe
• Provider-independent VoIP support
• Office document editor

Main disadvantages:

• Below average camera performance
• Video recording maxes out at QVGA@15fps
• No dedicated camera key
• USB ver 1.1

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Unboxing

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Review

Hardware:

Before everything else, the moment you hold this device in your hand the first thing that strikes you is its size. It’s tiny. Now that we are over the initial shock, let’s talk about its construction. It’d suffice to say that E71 is built like a tank. Nokia, as it seems, has gone an extra mile at making sure that this thing shouts; quality. There are no creaking hinges, no moving keyboard panels; buttons have a solid feel to them and give out excellent feedback when pressed.

Now, many of you are of the opinion that the keyboard on this phone is too tiny to be of use. I’d say that the idea is relative, at best. It took me no more than 2 days to get used to typing on E71 and coming from iPhone, that’s pretty darn good. But then again, a user with bigger digits might find it difficult to type on such compactly arranged keys.

Since I’ve been using it over a normal GSM network since the very offset, I wouldn’t be able to comment on its 3G performance. But, other reviewers have suggested that any problems that existed with initial builds of Nokia E71, regarding its UMTS performance have been taken care of in more recent builds.

The antenna on this phone, just like the iPhone, is built near the mouthpiece. That, I believe, was done in order to reduce its SAR affects (which is towards the high side, on this phone).

Camera on this phone sucks, in bad or low light environments. So there is really nothing to write home about, in that case.

As for its battery life, it easily gives me 2 full days of juice with regular use of GPS, Push mail, listening to podcasts, ftp and SSH access to this forum’s server, downloading RSS news feeds and regular browsing.

Nokia E71 comes with one of the smallest and fastest Nokia chargers. It takes hardly over a couple of hours to give your E71 a full charge.

Software:

It goes without saying that due to the presence of ‘Ram’ and ‘demand paging’, S60 ver 3.0 blazes away on this baby. There is hardly, if any, lag in the menu operations. And that it’s easily able to run multiple applications in the background without breaking in to sweat.

I'm absolutely in love with the Nokia Podcast utility. There is no more need for you now to sync your phone with your computer in order to transfer podcasts. The utility allows you to download podcasts of your choice over the air via Wifi or 3G/EDGE data network.

The sync application allows you to perform over the air syncs with Google calender as well, which should let you keep your schedule up to date at all times.

Remote wipe, another interesting in built application allows you to send your phone a pre-determined sms message which will wipe all of your personal data from the phone.

Since E71 comes equipped with AGPS, it locks on to satellites within seconds of a cold start. And holds the signal pretty tight. I've used it to geo-cache a few of my trips and all of them have come out very accurate.

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A few UI screenshots:

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My favourite applications:

Nokia Podcasts, Mobbler, Resco News, X-Plore, Nokia Sports Tracker, Seven, Sic! FTP, Putty, Phone Locator, M! Weather, Joikuspot, Opera Mini, Palringo, Beeper, Calcium, Wireless IRC.


A few snaps from the camera:

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Conclusion:

It's one of the most well equipped business phones out there, with looks that could kill. Except for a sub-par camera performance, the rest of its functionality set simply blows its competition out of the water. And for me, it has been a very worthy upgrade from iPhone 2G.

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