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It has been a long while since I am feeling this excited over a new piece of gadget. My last one was when I get Palm Vx way back in 1999 (that is a looong time ago). I have been eyeing on Nokia E71 for a while since the spy shots start leaking in the blogosphere and official announcement by Nokia last June. Nokia E71 impressive specifications and form factor seems to suit my needs, and I must say that I am not disappointed with the product after using it for 1 week now.

I got my Nokia E71 last Monday (07/07) and have been playing it ever since. You already seen enough review from other blogs on E71 size, specs, comparison, etc., so I will not waste space and repeat them again here. This post will be more of my sharing and experience of putting the E71 to the actual day-to-day usage test during the past 1 week. Enjoy!

Build Quality

The first impression you get for E71 is stylish and solid build quality. Most part of the unit is covered with metal, except the glass covered LCD and the rubbery keypad (or should we call it keyboard?). You cannot appreciate how slim is this device from looking at photos or brochures. You need to put it in your hand and feel it yourself. It is not too light to make it feel cheap, or too heavy to make it uncomfortable to carry. It is the right size and weight even to put in your shirt pocket.

One drawback of the metal casing is that the back cover easily becomes fingerprint and smudge magnet, especially if you are holding it with oily hands.

Typing & Keyboard

E71 comes with a full QWERTY keyboard. The small sized keyboard surprisingly is very comfortable as each of the buttons are raised and made of rubber material similar to E90 with good tactile feedback. For you having concern on the smallish E71 keyboard size, don’t worry. I must say that E71 is having the most comfortable QWERTY keyboard as compare to any similar devices I’ve ever tried.

Nokia also equipped E71 with the new T9 text predictive, which is an upgrade from previous version. The new T9 is now with ability even to help you with the proper word completion (similar to the feature you already seen in Windows Mobile OS). The feature is quite fun, but I ended up turning it off since I found as having the full QWERTY keyboard I no longer need any T9 assistance.

There’s 4 default application buttons on the same level with the D-pad, with icons representing the most used applications. i.e. Home, Calendar, Contact & Messaging. Unlike previous version, in E71 you are allowed to set the button and make your own shortcuts. 3 out of the 4 buttons can be customized for short key press and long key press, making it become 6 shortcuts. E.g. short keypress of Messaging button will call up SMS and long keypress will call up E-mail.

Interface

The device is running S60 3rd edition FP1 with some extended features (to be explained later), which is very solid and stable. Over the 1 weeklong usage I never had any system crash yet, except isolated cases when I tried installing some incompatible Nokia Beta Labs applications.

Ability to quickly navigate between menus and jumping from one application to another is a very important factor for me. This is the reason for me switching from previously N95 to N82 because of the slow response time between key presses. Nokia E71 is as snappy (or even faster) than N82. I think this is crucial as Nokia E71 as business machine need to empower the users to work faster, to be more productive and less device nagging. E71 passed my test on this with flying colors.

E71 also come with a feature called Switch Mode, which is new and first introduced in Nokia phones. Switch Mode allows you to set and switch between 2 different home screens, e.g. you can set a “Work” home screen work weekdays and switch to “Personal” home screen on weekends, so you do not have to look at all your email notification or meeting alerts on your screen when you are spending leisure time with family

The Home Screen also highly customizable. You can choose and set from as many as 15 standby plug-ins to be enabled in the home screen, e.g. show email notification, miss calls, to-do, radio, search, etc. Again another winner here!

Business Applications

Nokia E71 comes as a business phones, so the emphasis should be on the business applications, right? I found notably improvements done by Nokia in some of the areas, but also lacking in very important updates in some key applications.

• Contact

Nokia had done good job in making the Contact application more intuitive. Once a contact is selected you can press right D-pad and it will reveal a pop-up listing all available mode to get in touch with selected contact, e.g. voice call, send text msg, send e-mail, send MMS, etc.

There’s actually a powerful feature, which allow you to do quick contact search from the standby screen, such capabilities usually known as Smart Dialing in Windows Mobile devices, whereas you type in alphanumeric characters and immediately they will list out possible matches against available contact. Unfortunately Nokia forget to enable this function for the E71 firmware they release in Asia, promised it will be available soon via firmware upgrade. Arrrr…

• Calendar

Major improvement in Calendar, as you can now have split screen mode similar like E90. Must admit that the previous Nokia Calendar application is pretty lame, luckily Nokia move to bring in this much needed improvement.

• Messaging

For such excellent QWERTY device, the email application in E71 is a big disappointment. Not improvement was found as compare to previous models. We still getting the mediocre email client and still, with the IMAP4 auto-retrieval dropping connection problem.

• Office applications

Another disappointment as Nokia E71 comes pre-installed with QuickOffice 4.1.35 with no support for MS Office 2007 formats. You need to upgrade to QuickOffice 5.0 to have Office 2007 compatibility, which will cost you another USD 40-50. Other office applications pre-installed including Adobe PDF reader, Zip, Dictionary, Converter, etc. I must point out that the Dictionary from Nokia allows you to download additional languages from Nokia website. New language packs are available for download (free) including Bahasa Indonesia, Chinese, Dutch, Hungary, Hindi, Japan, Italian, Hebrew, etc.

• OCR Scanner

I cheered when I found a pre-installed application in Nokia called Multiscan, which is a scanner/camera with OCR/character recognition software. The application allows you to take picture containing some writings and automatically convert them into editable text/numbers. The OCR software also allow functionality as business card scanner, automatically convert the scanned business card into vCard to be saved in your Contact. This is useful!

Other applications pre-installed in Nokia E71, some also pretty cool, like the Advance Call Manager (call filter, answering machine), Worldmate (travel application), Wireless Presenter, etc. too many to describe one by one here, but all quite nice.

Multimedia

Nokia E71 is segmented as business device, but it boosts adequate multimedia capabilities. The web browser support Flash 3 allowing you to watch Youtube clips online, the video codec had been updated to include H.264 support and play most MP4 format. Music playback also quite good with the build in speaker.
Nokia E71 got a FM tuner included and you can download the database for radio station channels for major cities around the world which I must say quite complete.

One thing annoys me is that the FM radio will work only if you plug in the wired headphone jack. Meaning I can use my Plantronic Discovery 855, stereo Bluetooth headset to listen to music player, but to listen to FM radio I must manually plug in a wired headset. Why Nokia?

The device comes with 3.2 megapixels camera, which is adequate for me. Camera works quite fast, took 2-3 seconds to standby or between snaps. Image quality is OK on well lit condition, but grainy for indoor or at night. E71 also comes pre-installed with Nokia Share Online 3.0, which makes it easier for you to upload photo, video or audio to online services (support Flickr, Ovi and Vox).

Map & GPS

Comes with the new Nokia Map 2.0 and A-GPS (network assisted GPS, giving you better location lock by leveraging the operator network infrastructure). Mine comes with a 3 months trial on the voice assisted navigation. The GPS locking also went well, taking between 10-15 seconds to get my location.

Connectivity

This device got every kind of connections you need, from WiFi, infra red (old school?), Bluetooth and USB. Unfortunately, the USB is using the micro UBS cable (meaning carry an extra cable), and it is only USB 1.1 standard (slow!). When you connect the USB cable, besides the usual PC Suite, Mass Storage, or Media Transfer, you also find a new option call “Connect PC to Web”.

If you select the last option, it essentially upload and install a Nokia Internet application to the PC which will allow the PC to connect to Internet using E71 as the modem. This is sure handy when you are in emergency need of Internet connection, just plug in E71 to any PC and it will take care of the rest.

Battery Life

During my trial, I abuse the E71 by installing/uninstalling various application, connect to different devices using Bluetooth radio, Internet browsing and large file download/upload via Wi-Fi (podcasting, flickr photo upload, ovi video upload, etc.) and not to mention my daily voice call which is quite intense as well. Nokia E71 battery able to give me over 2.5 days of continuous service. This is impressive since Nokia N95 only able to last 8-9 hours on similar torture and N82 survive for almost a day. I must say that battery in E71 at least last twice longer than N82.

Summary

I am very pleased and enjoy using Nokia E71 and I wouldn’t hesitate to say that it is one of the best phone ever come out from Nokia and one of the best phone I’ve ever used. It got the style, the speed, the complete functionalities, and the capabilities can even be further expanded using the vastly available Symbian third party software. And it all comes in a thin sexy unit, the smallest QWERTY device with the most functionality.

However still need improvement in its basic capabilities as business device, especially a much better email client, better push email integration, or instant messaging to name a few. Once Nokia able to achieve this, then we sure Blackberry killer and RIM should better be afraid.

About

Andy Zain is a self-confessed geek and technology slave. He’s been around the IT industry for almost 15 years and involved in companies including Apple Computer, Nokia, the telco operators in Indonesia and the region. He is the founder of MobileMonday (www.mobilemonday.co.id), which is the largest networking forum for professionals in mobile industry in Indonesia.

Living in Jakarta, currently Andy is active in managing an IT/wireless company and helping some technology start-ups. You can follow his adventure in www.emfelo.com as well as http://twitter.com/andyzain.