Nokia E71

The Nokia E71 as a phone

Here the E71 is very much at ease. No problems for making or receiving, the sound is clean and clear. This is especially agreeable with such advanced telephone features.

What we’re most interested in is, of course, management of contacts, one of the really important points on pro phones. The qwerty keyboard is a real bonus here as you just have to key in the first letters of a name for it to appear. This is a much easier system than going through a long contacts list. The same goes for the contacts cards (easy to fill in).

The screen however has quite weak resolution: you only get the surname and first name on a one line display, whereas on a Blackberry you can, for example, display a contact’s company on a second line. This is very practical when you have hundreds of contacts in your address book.

When you start it up, you get the Nokia feel right off, and this on a pro phone! It's packed with installation and configuration assistants of all types, notably a telephony assistant that allows you to configure your network operator automatically, even without the SIM card inserted. This is very practical when travelling, keeping you available at all times.

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While waiting for the phone to configure, lets take a tour of the estate. Mostly metal, you can smell the E71’s quality without being overwhelmed by the scent. Pretty well-assembled, only the keyboard seems a bit plasticky. As we’ll see however, it is very comfortable and practical to use. The mail buttons are positioned so you can action them even when the phone is in its cover: well-thought out.

The same goes for the navigation pad. Nokia has isolated certain pro functions (diary, contacts list, email) and allocated dedicated buttons. This gives rapid access that compensates for the comparatively poor (when put alongside the trackball of a Hero or Blackberry) navigation given by the standard directional pad.

Almost twice as slim as the iPhone, and slimmer than the bold, the E71 is not however a lightweight

E71, the phone to combine your professional and personal life

Based on the Symbian S60 3rd edition FP1, the E71 is very responsive. This OS, though not the most aesthetic, is very effective for pro use. Lets take the time to cover an interesting point here: you can create two different screens for the E71, a pro screen and a personal screen. The visual themes are independent of each other and you can organise the icons differently depending on the screen. This is a real bonus for those who only have the one phone for personal and professional use.

Here, as on start-up, the different settings are all facilitated with numerous assistants and are easy to access. Sure, configuring an IMAP mail account or Exchange is not especially simple for those used to general public multimedia phones, but of course this phone is not targetting the same market.

Symbian S60 3rd edition and its interface, not looking quite up to date

Pro, pro and more pro

One of the weak points of the E71 is certainly its screen that is lacking in both brightness and resolution. Sure, it’s fluid but it loses out in legibility and aesthetics. And of course, display of contacts and mails is obviously compromised. In comparison, the Bold has smoother fonts and more detailed displays of contacts and mails, without compromising on quantity of content.

Let’s pause again for a second to look at mailing, an important area that has been well dealt with here, though there are a few gaps. Mailing is shared by two different pieces of software. The first manages access to an Exchange server, the second the webmail and other standard ISP server pre-configurations. This means you can simply enter your Yahoo or Gmail account without having to go through complex settings. Multiple mail accounts are supported no problem, with two exceptions: the number of unread mails cannot go over 999 (big users will regularly go over this limit) and you can’t display all mails from all accounts on a single page, something you can do on a Blackberry.

Mail display options, summaries and pre-download views can also be a bit bizarre, though they shouldn’t make for any major inconvencience on usage.

The low screen resolution has, as we’ve said, an impact on mails: the default display is one line per mail, which is not much and often makes it difficult to see what mail you’re viewing before opening it. You can set the display to two lines but then you lose out in terms of how much of a line can be visualised.

Display of HTML mails is well managed and transits through the navigator very well though you’re a long way off what you get with general public phones. As for opening Office/PDF docs, Quick Office does a great job. Last of all, the keyboard (bulging keys): though tight you rarely make any errors, particularly as the predictive text and auto-correction featutes are devilishly effective.

For SIP ad IPBX, or in other words, IP phoning, software support is very thorough as you can use your own SIP account at the same time as connecting to an internal company phone network (the E71 supports Wi-Fi 802.11g). The same goes for on-line conferencing, call transfers and availability. Those with data packages won’t have any problem using them with their E71 as a modem and a VPN utility is supplied.

Mail management on the E71