SALE! KIMSTORE: NOKIA E71 w/ 1 year nokia warranty

Brand new with 1 year Nokia warranty

Nokia E71

After all, you can bang out SMS/emails on this device, but there's a lot more under the hood and the E71 looks to be a fairly good all rounder. The S60 implementation used is still a little under-powered at times, most notably when opening images and playing back videos, but it's fine for everyday productivity and general mobile computing.

In some ways the E71 is the iPhone's nemesis - using almost the identical dimensions in a totally different way, for a totally different set of users. The iPhone excels at media consumption (Music/photos/video/web), while the E71's strengths are in media creation (typing documents, Office work, camera, camcorder, and so on - the usual Nokia/S60 strengths). Both devices can do most of what the other does, just not as well. The attempted crossover is evidenced by the iPhone 2 platform adding enterprise features while the E71 now plays DRMed WMA music, etc. Then there are the starkly different form factors. And the different target markets (personal vs company use). Add in the elegantly-simple- but-not-as-deep UI of the iPhone compared to the useable but-you-need-to-be-fairly-tech-savvy-to-find-everything approach for S60 on the E71, and I can only emphasise once again that they're polar opposites.

From E61 to E71

As you can see, the form factor's been on a diet over the last two years - the E71 has been a long time coming but the new size (112mm high by 57mm wide by a mere 11mm thick) is a huge improvement overall.

The downsides are a) that you need to perform even more finger gymnastics in order to type on the (45mm from q to p) tiny thumb keyboard - the E71 really isn't going to be good for those with big hands, and b) that the screen has had to be down-specced to 2.4" - you'll remember that the original E61/E61i design had a massive 2.8" screen. Those two aspects apart though, it's up, up, all the way.

The upgrades, then: the camera's now 3.2 megapixels with optional auto-focus and LED flash (the E61i was 2mp with no focus or flash), the processor seems to be a good 50% faster (based on timing web page and image rendering, although the inclusion of demand paging also helps here) and the free RAM has been tripled. In addition, the use of S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 has made things smoother and nippier at all turns - with the inclusion of up to date audio and video codecs, including H.264 and WMA, notably.

For most people, the smaller and lighter device, together with the spec upgrades, will be compelling - but the downsizing of screen and key size are still well worth noting if these are important to you.

Around the aforementioned screen (transflective, very bright and readable, even doing adequately in sunlight) and miniature keyboard are comparative acres of mirror-finish metal (spot the unit I'm shooting photos with, below), looking stylish but rather prone to fingerprints. The phone microphone is of high quality but is embedded in this front surface, which means that any video you shoot later will have slightly skewed sound - not a huge problem, but, again, worth noting.

The keys themselves are terrific, despite the miniscule size, with good feel and travel. Using my standard typing speed test, the E71 came out at around 28 words per minute, roughly the same as its predecessor, the E61, with the larger keyboard - considering the reduced form factor, this is pretty decent, although the smaller key spacing does mean that for some letter combinations you'll get your fingers in a muddle. In use, the keyboard reminded me strongly of that of a Palm Treo - and given that this is the gold standard in thumb keyboards, this should be taken as a compliment(!) In addition, there's a new word completion system, see below for more on this.

I'm fine with most of the keyboard layout, but have to take issue with 'Ctrl', whose use I get the impression Nokia are trying to deprecate. It's now a 'Fn' keypress (above 'Chr'), so to do 'Ctrl-X', for example, you actually have to press three keys at once, really tricky on something so small. Disappointing.

As with the E51, the 'S60 menu' key is now a 'Home' icon - a change I like a lot, plus there are shortcut keys for Calendar, Contacts and Email - and, even better, you can define extra apps to switch to/launch for long presses on each shortcut key. So, for example, a long press on Contacts might bring up Jaiku.

The D-pad is outstanding, the best such control I've used in several years. With the screen being QVGA, there are many, many compatible games (maybe N-Gage will make an appearance here?) and having a good D-pad to work them is half the battle. In case you were hoping for a higher resolution screen, I'm with Nokia on this one - VGA in a 2.4" display is just silly and wastefully expensive. QVGA on the E71 looks crisp and good. It's only really when web browsing that you'll come a cropper - as usual with S60 Web in such a low resolution display.

Around the sides of the E71 are: Top: power button and mono speaker (good volume and quality). Left: microSD slot, microUSB port (the E61i was Pop-port, so the E71 has leapfrogged the miniUSB standard completely!). Bottom: charging port. Right: Volume up/down, voice recording button, standard 2.5mm 4-way stereo headset jack.

Most of the E71's rear is metal, with a patterned mirror finish, with the camera module adding a couple of mm to the 11mm basic thickness in a little bump, featuring a tiny camera, a LED flash and an aiming mirror - though, to be honest, the entire back forms a good enough mirror for framing yourself when talking 'to camera'.

Buttons either side of the case pop off the rear cover, revealing the huge BP-4L battery, the same one as used in the E61i and E90, which will please cost-conscious (or green) companies - and 1500mAh will power the E71 for an eternity. Even with heavy Wi-Fi use and music/camera activity, the E71 will easily last a working day - and often two. Take the battery out and you appreciate just how stunningly light the E71's body is and how hard Nokia has worked to miniaturise everything. Good design, guys.

S60 Basics, S60 extensions

There's little need to describe the basics of S60 here - originally designed for one-handed use with portrait screen, it has scaled fairly well to part-time two-handed use with keyboard and landscape screen, as evidenced by the popularity of the E61 family. But it's important to note that there have been a lot of tweaks by the Eseries team to the standby screen, the OS and basic applications - and mostly for the better - I'd like to see these tweaks rolled out across other S60 devices.

The first surprise is on the standby screen, with a new ying/yang icon, marked 'Switch mode'. Modes are a new concept, based around the idea that you do different things with your smartphone at different times in your day/week. Two example modes are supplied, modelling possible standby configurations (in terms of theme, application shortcuts, standby plug-ins and wallpaper), but you can create your own and generally fiddle with your modes until the cows come home. It's a neat idea but it remains to be seen how many non-geeks get round to serious tinkering.

The number of possible standby plug-ins has increased too, to a massive 15, from Music player to Email to Calendar to Search, although only a handful can be shown at once, so you have to be quite selective - still, more choice is better than none. A new voicemail icon can be highlighted, to show a popup menu with common voicemail options at the start and then as appropriate thereafter, depending on what's waiting for you.

Of extra special interest on the standby screen is smart dialling, in that you can start tapping out the characters of a name and they'll be quick matched against your Contacts. The implementation is a little messy in that what's displayed in the main text field are the numeric characters, but the contact matching does work:

Opening the main menu shows that Nokia has done a serious job of organising the 50 or so apps and mini-apps into folders. Personally, I found it annoying and wanted to move the icons around to suit my way of working, but then that's the joy of S60, in that you can get your phone working exactly the way you want it. Dipping into the folders reveals a lot to take note of:

• A shortcut for VoIP (by default set to download Gizmo, but you can add your own).
• A tweaked version of Contacts. The old contact groups have been moved from a tab to the Options menu and pressing 'right' on a contact now brings up a pop-up menu showing the five most common ways in which you might want to get in touch with that person, e.g. voice, SMS, video call, etc. A useful UI shortcut, even a little inelegant, given the duplication of Options menu functions.
  

  

• Calendar has had even more of a tweak. The month view is now split screen, E90-style, while the day screen now has an Outlook-style hourly layout - very pretty but tedious to navigate sometimes. Finally, when editing an entry, there's a new highly condensed dialog, meaning you can set more information without having to scroll down several screens worth of options, as in the old S60 Calendar.
  

  

   
• Quickoffice is now up to v4.1, giving good Office round-tripping but without some of the extras (such as Office 2007 support) that you'd get by paying extra for the latest Quickoffice 5.0 - it's a shame that this has to be a pay-for upgrade, I really can't see why they didn't just put Quickoffice 5.0 in the ROM and send some dollars over to Quickoffice for the license - the current situation just annoys most purchasers.
  

  

   
• There's a licensed version of Kernerman's Dictionary engine, along with links to download various language pairs for free. Given that both English and translation dictionaries are amongst the most popular third party applications, it's great to have this built in here for free.
  

  

• There's a new 'Intranet' icon - the idea being that your company's IT department installs VPN settings on its devices, so that you can access its Intranet in encrypted fashion using Web. It should work fine but I wasn't able to test this.
  

  

   
• 'Encryption' is a new setting/icon for the paranoid and nothing to do with VPN. Instead, it offers on-the-fly encryption and decryption of everything in your E71's internal flash disk and/or memory card. The encryption uses your lock code as its key and, having asked for encryption, the processor gets to work on the initial changes to files, which takes a minute or two. I didn't notice a slow down in operation after encryption. In a corporate environment, with an E71 potentially stuffed with confidential documents, this encryption ability will be greatly welcomed. Sales manager lose his phone? No worries, it's fully encrypted from the eyes of even an experienced hacker. And a remote wipe is only a phone call away if needed, as extra security.
  

  

• There's the Nokia Music Store client - a first for an Eseries device - whatever next?  Provided you're OK with the DRM on each (WMA) track and don't intend to switch devices too often, this is a good way to buy music instantly, over the air. (Regular readers will know that I'm not big on DRM - I simply copied across a few Gigabytes of unDRMed music files from my (ripped) CD collection with the E71's microSD card in 'Mass Storage' mode)
  

  

   
• Gallery is the same tired old application as in S60 devices three years ago. Why, oh why, hasn't Nokia's Eseries team asked the Nseries team for the code to the slick Gallery featured in every N device since the N93, over two years ago? Gallery works here, but it's not pretty and it's not pleasant.
  

  

   
• Messaging is another application long overdue for an update - word on the street is that this was planned for the E71 but never made it into production, a shame. At least there's a shiny new email set up wizard that queries a Nokia online database for settings - the user just enters their email address and all the rest is set up automatically - really neat and seems to work most of the time.
• Another multimedia surprise - Podcasting's preinstalled! One less app for the user to have to go off and download.
  

  

• Yet another Nseries crossover - Share Online 3.0 is also preinstalled. So E71 owners will be able to take part in the great Ovi/FLickr photo-and-video-sharing-fest from the outset. With both camera and camcorder being decent on the E71, there's no reason not to take an active part and show off some really good media.
  

  

   
• Global Race and (a fully licensed copy of) Top Hits Solitaires are included (via Download!) - after all, even Eseries users need to play - personally, I'd like to see an N-Gage client for the E71 - the hardware is up to the job. (Incidentally, the old E61 game exclusives, such as Golf Pro Contest, aren't compatible - yet)
  

  

• At last - a new device with Nokia Maps 2.0 built into the ROM - every device I'd previously seen had the old v1.2 application by default. I know Nokia Maps voice navigation's subscription model has its critics, but I'm a fan - and route guidance in my hands has been at least as good as any other full 'prepaid' commercial navigation solution. The GPS antenna seems to be in the E71's top and reception was very good, similar to that on the N82. I also installed the free Google Maps and this also worked well, as expected. The landscape screen somehow seems more natural for mapping and navigation software, despite the reduced screen real estate.
  

  

  

• The E71 does have Flash Lite 3, as with the E90's latest firmware update. Using Web, I was able to view Flash videos in YouTube and Ovi Share pages. Playback wasn't silky smooth, but  it was 'good enough'.
  

    

One other innovation for the E71 (and its stablemate, the slider E66) is that when the main display is keylocked and timed out, rather than a traditional screensaver appearing, the display blanks completely. "But I need to know the time!" I hear you say. Simply press and hold the D-pad and the time appears in large letters, as shown here. A much better solution than the old non-backlit, small-fonted solution.

Impressively, full word completion (not just T9-style predictive text) has been integrated into the interface, available as a toggle in any text editing field. For fans of this system it's wonderful, though I find that it doesn't really save time - I end up wasting as much time looking up at  what the system is suggesting (pressing D-pad in or space accepts the suggestion) as I would hunting for the right letters to make up the word manually. Still, useful to have and implemented well.

It's also worth noting that the way text is copied and pasted has been brought more into line with other S60 devices: as you hold down 'Shift' and highlight text, 'Copy' appears on the left function key. The old Ctrl-C method still works in most places, but won't be used as often because of the 'Ctrl' key placement.