Nokia E71 Smartphone

Last week Expansys shipped me a shiny new Nokia E71. This is a follow on to the popular E61/E62, and a sig­nif­i­cant step up from my E60 which also lacked 3G support on AT&T's network.

I was thinking about getting an iPhone, but the poor battery life and lack of real keys were a problem for me. It turns out Joel Spolsky got an E71 too - maybe great minds think alike?

The Good

  • Great battery life with a mixture of voice, WiFi, HSDPA (3G), and GPS usage. It only needs to be charged every third day.
  • Some very solid ap­pli­ca­tions are available including Mail by Google, Google Maps with GPS in­te­gra­tion, and a decent Web Browser (based on Safari/KHTML). It plays Flash in the the browser, so YouTube doesn't need it's own ap­pli­ca­tion. The device supports Java (J2ME), Python, and Symbian C++ ap­pli­ca­tions so there is a big market.
  • Camera. Whilst users of the consumer Nseries phones may have a better camera in their phones, the 3 megapixels works pretty well for me. I was able to post to Flickr without down­load­ing another ap­pli­ca­tion.
  • Bling factor! It's lighter and slightly thinner than an iPhone. It's stainless steel outer shell is also a nice touch.
The Bad
  • Ap­pli­ca­tion market is likely to grow faster in the iPhone and Windows Mobile world. Nokia need to improve their de­vel­op­ment tools and doc­u­men­ta­tion. Python support is a nice touch but they can do better.
  • Locking the device can be a pain since the default option when you tap the power button is to switch off. Perhaps there is an ap­pli­ca­tion that can hook this button?
  • Headphone socket is 2.5mm instead of the regular 3.5mm size. It means you need to carry a convertor or a second set of headphones.
  • Flash Lite 3 seems to be integrated with the File Manager. This can be annoying if the Flash doesn't fully support a device without a touch screen.
  • No touch screen. Sometimes it's nice to be able to do things with a stylus or your finger. You won't miss this if you are coming from a Nokia phone.
So that's it for my E71 review. I'll update this post as I get more experience with the device.

Tagged with e71, nokia and review.