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Nokia E71 review

I have used the Nokia E71 for almost a week and have tried to summarize my thoughts about it for anyone considering purchasing one.

Package contents

• Phone
• 1500 mAh battery
• Charger
• Stereo handsfree
• USB cable
• Leather case
• Manuals
• Software DVD
• 2 GB Micro SD card preloaded with maps of the nordic countries and one year of free navigation

Look and feel

Build

The phone is very thin, but feels really well built. The back cover and front panel is metal and the screen seems to be real glass, not plastic, which gives a very good first impression. Everything fits together nicely and there is no squeaking when writing.

Keyboard

The keyboard is small, but the keys are separated enough to give a good feeling when writing. My only complaint with the keyboard is that the key “å” on the finnish keyboard requires using the function key. The Ctrl key also requires using the function key, so a simple Ctrl-C becomes function-Ctrl-C, wich is quite uncomfortable given the positions of the keys. A smaller space button would have allowed these two keys their own dedicated buttons on the keyboard. These are by no means big issues and overall I am very pleased with the keyboard.

Other keys and inputs

On the sides there are two plastic covers covering the memory card slot and USB cable input. There is also a infrared port in case some one still uses that. On the other side there are volume buttons and a 2.5 mm headphone/handsfree jack. My main concerns here are with the inputs. Nokia has for some reason decided on not using a standard mini-USB connector, but has instead used a almost identical connector with rounded edges. So now I have to carry one more cable in my backpack. The phone supports mass storage mode for easy file transfers. The phone does not charge through USB, which is a shame because it would be nice to have the phone charging while using it as a modem. The volume buttons on the side seem to be underutilized, I would like them to be application-aware so I could use them for zooming in on maps and such things.

The other minor annoyance I found is that the headphone jack is 2.5 mm, a standard 3.5 mm jack would have made it much easier using own headphones when listening to music. The headphones that came in the package are fine for a handsfree, but not really up to the task when listening to music. I didn’t buy this phone for music, so it’s not a big deal for me, but I can imagine it being for someone else.

Software

Operating system

The software seems to be quite stable and fast. Menus are responsive and the UI logic is the same familiar Symbian as always. My biggest annoyance is that the themes that came with the phone are ugly and even when changing themes the default icons stay the same. The icons are dull and gray, a bit cartoonish. I would prefer cleaner colors and more fresh icons.

Browser

The Nokia browser is based on WebKit, the same rendering engine as Safari uses. It renders pages very well for the small screen. It finds the main textblocks and shrinks the width of them to match the width of the screen so you don’t need to scroll sideways reading a text. The browser supports JavaScript and even AJAX sites have worked as supposed. The browser also has a Flash lite plugin, which renders Flash inline, and even supports video. When watching YouTube for example you can click the video to make it fullscreen on the device, a very nice function for a mobile browser. The browser has only quit on me once loading a flash-heavy site, which is a very improvement over the browser in the E70 wich crapped out on me almost daily.

Calendar

The calendar software is clear and simple, offering month, week and day views. You can add four types of entries: Meetings, memos, anniversaries and to do items. The default month layout has a two panel display with the calendar to the left and the selected days events to the right.

Email

Nokia emphasized the ease of setting up email on the E71 and for certain users this is really the case. Out of my four email accounts, two were correctly set up by the wizard, only requiring me to enter email address and password. The other two still required manual setup. Overall, I feel that the email client has improved since I last used it in my old Nokia E70.

My major issue with the email client is that it still does not display HTML email inline, to see the HTML email as it was intended you need to click the attachment.html link, which opens the email in the web browser.

You can configure the client to automatically retrieve emails on a per-account basis. You can also select which days email should be automatically downloaded and what time. You can select the checking interval between 5 minutes and 6 hours. I have noticed that selecting a short checking interval will leave the IMAP connection open, which results in a almost push-email like behavior where emails arrive in your phone instantly when they arrive in your mailbox. This does drain the battery quite a lot though.

Nokia Maps

Nokia has had a large ad campaign for Nokia Maps here in Finland, with slogans like “Nokia Maps gets you there”. I was very eager to try out Nokia Maps as I have an old TomTom standalone GPS navigator in my car that I wouldn’t mind having integrated in my phone.

To my big disappointment, Nokia Maps seems to be completely unsuitable for car navigation. Out of the six times I have tried it, it has mislead me or told me to make illegal turns more than four times. Once it wanted me to turn sharply right on a small road when I was supposed to go straight. When I turned right it told me to make a U-turn. Another time it wanted me to cut over four highway lanes and take the exit on the other side. On another occasion it told me to turn on the highway heading in the complete opposite direction of where I was going.

To make matters worse, these tests were conducted in Espoo, the city where Nokia has its headquarters. I don’t want to know how bad the maps are elsewhere if they don’t even work in Nokia’s own backyard.

Another, even if much smaller, annoyance is that the cursor doesn’t stay on the road while driving. My TomTom assumes that when I’m driving, I’m driving on the road and draws the cursor accordingly. Nokia Maps seems to draw the cursor at the exact GPS location it gets, which results in it driving off the road quite often.

The GPS itself seems to work nicely, it finds itself on the map really fast, usually in under 30 seconds thanks to the assisted GPS functionality. I still haven’t tried the pedestrian mode that Nokia advertises in Nokia Maps 2, but I would hope that it works better than the car navigation.

Other features

Camera

The Nokia E71 has a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus on the back and a small camera for video calls (does anyone make video calls?). The main camera takes decent pictures in good lighting, but they get pretty grainy once the sun starts to go down. The built in flash is just a led that lights up while taking a picture, so don’t count on it to save your night shots. To focus the camera you need to press the T-button right underneath the navigation button because the navigation button, which is also the trigger button, lacks the two-step press functionality usually used in cameras.

Conclusion

Overall, I am very pleased with this phone. It is small enough to be carried unnoticed in a pocket, yet sturdy enough not to feel like a toy. The glass and chrome look gives it a very professional feel. The keyboard has dedicated buttons for key functions like email and calendar and has a very good feel to it when writing.

The battery-life is much better than I expected. After a day’s worth of heavy use the battery is still over half full. With comparable use my Samsung SGH-I600 only got about 4 hours of battery life, so this is a huge improvement for me.

This is a very good business telephone. It does handle multimedia well, but it is clear that the main focus has been business use. The business part is where E71 really excels. Reading and writing email, messages (with attachments), surfing the web and staying organized with the calendar are what the Nokia E71 does best. And because it is Symbian based there are hundreds of programs that allow you to expand the built in functionality with, to best suit your needs.

Anything that I left out? Something more you want to know? Post a comment and I’ll try to answer them as well as I can.

Update
With more normal use I made it through an entire day losing only one bar of battery (out of seven), very nice.

Normal use for me includes approximately:

• 20 SMS
• 10 minutes calling
• 1-2 hours surfing
• automatic email checking between 9 and 9
• about 10 minutes of GPS use
• Bluetooth on for about 15 min transferring install files
• 5 minutes of SSH