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The Nokia E71 – A review

posted by pt on 23^rd November, 2008, 21:41

I just got myself the Nokia E71 about a week or so ago. The E71 is one of the so called “business smartphones”. That means that it’s got quite a lot of features. That was exactly what I wanted my mobile phone to be able to do. I didn’t have quite a lot of demands, but the ones I had needed to be satisfied by the phone I want to buy.

Pros

The E71 is by default able to to the following things, that I consider quite important for my mobile phone: Calls and text massages (pretty default nowadays, I know), surfing the web using the integrated browser (or Opera Mini) via your carriers network or a WLAN hotspot, the integreated calendar is really good and easy to use, plus the phone’s got an integreated GPS receiver so that using Nokia’s Maps program (or Google Maps) is a real pleasure.

Also the music player is really good, so that you won’t ever again need to carry an iPod with you. Just load some MP3 files on the phone, and you’re done. The files will be automatically sorted by artist, album, and so on, using the files’ meta information.

Besides that another thing I found quite handy is the QWERTY keypad. At first it is a little bit scarry, when you’re used to typing letter with a mobile phone’s numpad, but after using it four just 2 or 3 days, I found it very easy and – most important – fast, to use. The integrated camera has got 3.2 mega pixels, what I for myself consider way enough for taking quick snapshots.

Cons

But after all the E71 isn’t perfect. There’s also some features that I’m missing and that I think should be added by Nokia anytime soon: First are the volume buttons, they don’t behave as expected in every application. The most annoying thing about them is, that they can’t be used to scroll when using the phone’s own web browser.

Another annoying thing is the fact, that on the one side you can save a contact’s birthday directly into his address book entry, but it won’t be displayed in the phone’s calendar. That’s some kind of very strange missbehaviour, in my opinion. Such a “feature” is available on every cheap mobile phone that comes for 0 euros with your carrier contract. So Nokia should defenitely have a look at that.

The last thing that comes to my mind is the fact that the E71 offers the user the possibility to switch between two modes. The “business mode” and the “private mode”. That’s a nice idea, but why was it implemented so badly? The address book offers the posibility to define a contact’s nickname. Why isn’t this nickname displayed instead of the persons full name in the call manager and other applications when I’m switching to “private mode”? It’s kind of logic that I know someone better when I know his nickname and call him this way. So that be another thing that I’d consider quite handy.

Conclusion

To cut a long story short, the E71 is an awesome phone. You can to so much things with it … So if you consider getting yourself a new mobile phone I can clearly recommend it to you!  

Edit (25^th Dec. 2008): The mobile phone blog WOM World referred to this entry in one of its posts, called “E71 gets a skater’s backing”