Techsploder

I’ve had a new Nokia E71-1 for a while now (it’s going back tomorrow) and was going to review it for one of the publications I write for. That went out of the window, so I thought I should post my thoughts on the E71 here instead. Joel Spolsky reckons the E71 is the best phone he’s ever had, and my expectations were high…

Steely feely and loadsa features

The E71 looks great and feels solid with a metal frame:

Nokia E71

Yep, it has a proper keyboard, important for people like me who like doing email on the hoof. The keys on the E71 are nice to use, even with my large hands, and I could type pretty fast on the phone. Even so, I quickly enabled the good predictive text feature on the E71 as two-finger typing is too slow to be practical.

Apart from volume up/down plus a small selector button on the right-hand side of the E71, all the buttons you need are where they should be: on the front. There’s button-mouse in the middle, plus shortcut and function buttons at the top - all in all, the E71 is fine ergonomically.

It’s slim too:

E71 side view

Nice - phat phones aren’t cool. The E71 is lightweight too, at 127g.

In the above picture, you can see the slot for the Micro-SD memory card (none supplied, unfortunately) and the USB cable that uses a small header instead of the usual one, so don’t lose it.

You can also see the Infrared transceiver in the picture; speaking of which, the E71 comes with a whole bundle of them. My model was the E71-1 which supports quad-band E-GSM in the 850, 900, 1800 and 1900MHz range. WCDMA/HSDPA is supported for 900MHz and 2100MHz. This means the E71 will be a good roamer, but you won’t get 3G on Telecom NZ’s new WCDMA network unfortunately.

But wait, there’s more wireless stuff built into the E71:

• 802.11b/g WiFi
• Bluetooth 2.0 EDR
• Integrated A-GPS
• FM radio

That’s pretty amazing, if you look how slim and slender the E71 is. I expected battery life to be next to nothing with all the above blazing away, but the 1,500mAh battery in the E71 easily lasts two days between charges and longer if you don’t flick on e.g. the WiFi like I did.

Other great stuff about the E71

• 110MB memory on the phone, expandable up to 8GB with a micro-SD card
• 2.36″ QVGA screen with 320 by 240 pixels and 16m colours is very visible outside
• This phone has one of the loudest speakers I’ve come across
• Call quality is top notch
• The phone is easy to use as a tethered modem either wirelessly or over the supplied USB cable.
• Desktop integration - well, with Microsoftware at least - with the PC Suite set of programs for message and contact management, as well as updating and full acccess to the phone.
• Heaps of software bundled, included a mini-productivity suite, Adobe Reader, and more
• Web browser that understands Javascript (up to version 1.5).
• GPS. Seriously, the next phone I get must have that. The one in the E71 isn’t as fast and flash as you’d get in a dedicated device like the ones from Navman or TomTom, but it’s still good and decently accurate. I was pleased to see it was able to pick up GPS signals indoors as well, in some buildings.

Ho-humm stuff on the E71

• This is no N95 with Zeiss optics. The 3.2Mpixel camera is only so and so:

  
  

  

  E71 camera sample

  In good light, the results are adequate albeit with red tint. The E71 does have a white light for when it’s dark, but the pictures I took were very grainy.

• Audio quality through the supplied earphones is only average. The audio player does play back a large variety of sound files, like MP3, WMA, RM, AAC, AAC+ and EAAC.
• Nokia Maps. WIth the GPS, I could find where I was on Nokia Maps easily, and they’re detailed enough with 3D and satellite views. Searching for street addresses in NZ seems to be hit and miss though. Many times I got Australian locations instead…
• NZ$949 price. That’s probably $200-$300 dearer than it should be, for the E71 to be competitive against other phones.

Not so great things about the N71

• Speed: the E71 feels sluggish. Applications load and run slowly, indicating perhaps that an anemic CPU was used to prolong battery life. The email client in particular is a sloth, and the web browser could be slow as well.
• Bugginess: even with a 1GB card onboard and phone memory not being used, the E71 would occasionally complain that it was out of memory, asking you to kill applications. Only way out of that was to either switch profiles or restart the phone. The email client had issues like not being able to display HTML messages (I know, people shouldn’t send those but they do) and enabling automatic retrieval made the phone grind to a halt.
• It’s hard to find where things are on the E71. For instance, why do I have to go Menu -> Office -> Clock to set an alarm? The S60 interface could do with better organisation, methinks.
• Some features don’t work in NZ, like the Nokia Music Store, which I thought would be a major drawcard for buyers.

I’m rating the E71 as a “maybe”. With a lower price, and updated software (maybe a third-party browser and email client), you’ve got a decent business phone that provides some entertainment features as well, with great battery life. In fact, I’m trying hard to think what features the E71 is lacking, but can’t think of one.

Given the price however, I do think Nokia could do a better job, by polishing the UI and software offering on the E71.

October 9th, 2008 | Tags: E71, Nokia, review | Category: Featured, Reviews, mobile devices | Subscribe to comments | Leave a comment | Trackback URL