Nokia E71 review

Let’s not beat around the bush: this is a brilliant phone. If you only have ten seconds to spare, want push email and don’t shudder at the price, we’ll bid you farewell and point you in the direction of your nearest phone retailer. Buy it, be happy, farewell.

So why’s the E71 so brilliant? For a start, there’s its physicality. Compared to the BlackBerry 8820 or the Nokia E61, its predecessor, the E71 makes Twiggy look a bit podgy. Less than 1cm thick, Nokia correctly lauds it as the slimmest qwerty keyboard smartphone. It’s also narrower than rivals: 57mm may not sound much less than the 8820’s 66mm, but place the E71 next to the 8820 on a desk and the difference is noticeable.

Despite this lack of width, Nokia squeezes in a full QWERTY keyboard, and amazingly it’s among the very best we’ve used. Inevitably for such a compact device, typing requires precision, so you’ll find writing expansive emails frustrating. But few will complain, and it’s certainly more pleasant to type on than the Toshiba Portégé G710.

There is a strong alternative in the form of RIM’s BlackBerry Pearl 8120, which forgoes the single letter per key approach but still allows you type quickly thanks to clever word prediction and a QWERTY layout. The 8120 is slimmer than the E71, but thicker.

We’re also fans of the E71’s screen, a bright affair measuring 320 pixels across and 240 down. While some will bemoan the lack of detail, its sharpness makes everything from photos to websites look pleasant. It’s also highly visible even in direct sunlight – another advantage it holds over the cheaper G710.

Wireless

Browsing is made all the more pleasant by the inclusion of HDSPA support, and as the networks’ coverage just keeps on increasing you’ll grow more and more used to seeing the “3.5G” stamp at the top-left of the screen.

Theoretically this offers up to 3.6Mb/sec downloads, but in our ad-hoc speed test – downloading a 5MB PDF over Vodafone’s 3.5G network – it took 90 seconds. That equates to 0.5Mb/sec, which is a more realistic download speed based on our overall experience.

Aside from the standard quad-band support, the E71 includes infrared, Bluetooth and 802.11g WLAN. Infrared may sound anachronistic, but it’s still useful if you need to quickly transfer a file between the phone and a laptop.

But it’s the Wi-Fi radio that you’ll probably use the most, and we found the bundled client extremely easy to use: moments after you set it scanning, it will detect all available networks and offer a list of access points to choose from.

Integrated GPS

As is becoming increasingly common, the E71 also includes a GPS receiver – in fact, Assisted GPS. We were pleased to see full-featured mapping software included too, in the form of Nokia’s most recent Maps 2 offering.

You can either search for an address in its database or use GPS to pinpoint you on the map, and with turn-by-turn driving directions an optional subscription-based upgrade (£7 for a month, £20 for three months, £55 for a year), there’s even the opportunity for in-car navigation.

Nokia also offers traffic update information on a subscription basis: £3 for a month, £6 for three months or £15.86 for a year.
This is no TomTom though. The small screen limits what can be seen, and we found it a little slow in use. It’s also heavy on the data plan: on one occasion it downloaded 1MB of data to display the map.

We quickly found ourselves downloading the much more pleasant Google Maps, but even with this in place it’s best to think of GPS as a handy addition to the E71’s features rather than a key part of any buying decision.

Getting the basics right

After the quietness of the Portégé it was a welcome relief to make calls on the E71. The speaker is both clear and loud, while our voice came through perfectly the other end. It’s also easy to adjust the volume thanks to sensibly placed up and down buttons.

Nokia doesn’t stint on shortcut buttons either. There’s a dedicated button for Home, calendar, contacts and messaging, plus the usual call start and call end buttons. The context-sensitive left and right buttons (usually for the active program’s options and ‘Back’) immediately under the screen complete the set, along with a five-way rocker button for left, right, up, down and select.

For protecting the screen, Nokia sensibly provides a leather pouch. It’s simple but effective, with the right-hand side left open so you don’t need to remove the bundled headphones if you’re listening to music or on a hands-free call (the latter worked reasonably well in practice, though the microphone is susceptible to wind noise).

The one improvement Nokia could consider would be a trackwheel instead of the rocker button, especially as the sheer number of buttons under the screen make it a little tricky to press the right one quickly.

Home and away

One interesting development with the E71 (and one we suspect others will copy) is the idea of multiple modes. So, you might set Work mode to give you a sensible wallpaper and a sensible selection of applications on the home page; it can also be set to show recent emails for your work email account.

You could then have a Home mode that shows your personal emails and uses a photo of your garden gnome as a wallpaper, and populate it with entertainment-centred applications. To switch between them is as simple as pressing the Switch icon that’s on the home page by default.

Keep it simple

But perhaps the E71’s biggest benefit is what it doesn’t do: make life difficult. Armed just with a corporate email address, password and the POP3 server details, we had the Nokia E71 receiving and sending emails in under two minutes.

Nokia also pre-installs its full Mail for Exchange client. This is a little trickier to set up, but as long as your IT department has support for push email over Exchange (and you have all the necessary details) you should find yourself with complete access to your email, calendar, contacts and tasks information wherever you are.

It’s even easier to set up personal email accounts. Nokia’s software supports all the major ISPs and webmail services, and was working with our test Gmail account in seconds. All we needed to enter was our email address and password.

Office life

Select Menu then Office, and you’ll find another of the E71’s strengths – namely, its comprehensive software selection. Quickoffice 4 offers Word, Excel and PowerPoint-style applications, and although they don’t have any advanced features they’re largely compatible with their Microsoft counterparts (though they can’t read Office 2007 docs). For example, beam your E71-created spreadsheet to a PC and it will work without any need for conversion.
Other apps include useful if minor additions such as a calculator, currency converter and Adobe Reader 1.5 LE. None of these are astonishing in themselves, but it adds up to a good suite of software the moment you start using the E71. Naturally, there’s full Java support as well.

Performance

We also love this device’s sheer speed. The 369MHz ARM processor is more than enough to make the Symbian S60-based operating system race along and we were never left staring vacantly at the screen, waiting for a task to complete.

Another point in the E71’s favour is its battery life. We used the device intensively over three days – far more than anyone would in general – and it just kept on going. Under light use it will easily last a week, and we’d expect a life of three-to-five days for most people.

That’s astonishingly impressive for such a slim phone, especially as it includes battery-draining technologies like GPS, 3G and WLAN. And, unlike the much-lauded iPhone, you can replace the 1,500mAh battery with ease.

Snap happy

As an entertainment device, though, the E71 certainly falls behind the iPhone. Though you can expand storage by 8GB via the microSD slot, the music player is very basic and many people simply won’t find it loud enough.

The 3.2-megapixel camera is also a little disappointing, with average rather than stunning image quality. You won’t be blown away by the detail capture or natural colours, nor by the amount of noise in low-light conditions, but at the least the maximum resolution of 2,048 x 1,536 means you can print out at A4 without horrible compromises. Should you wish to.

It can take video too, but these are again best thought of as snapshots – if that. With a maximum resolution of 320 x 240, they look their best on the E71’s screen rather than back on the PC. But by “best” we don’t mean anything special – the video stutters a little and there’s clear compression. This is reflected in the file size: a 15-second video, recorded in MP4 format, consumed just 833KB.

A little unpleasantness

So the E71 isn’t perfect. And our biggest complaint is a familiar one with Nokia phones: the fact it won’t charge over USB. This problem is compounded by Nokia’s proprietary connector for both the power charger and the USB connector.

People switching over from Windows Mobile will also be unimpressed by the need to install yet another piece of software – Nokia’s PC Suite – rather than just plugging the phone into a USB socket. This is one of the few advantages a Windows Mobile device indisputably holds over the Symbian and BlackBerry alternative.

Conclusion

Are these weaknesses enough to put us off the E71? Absolutely not. Few people buy a phone like this for its photo-taking or music-playing abilities, and the proprietary connectors – while annoying – are issues most can live with.

Its ability to handle email, make calls and handle day-to-day office chores is much more important, and this is where the E71 excels. Add the brilliant battery life, and it’s no surprise it wins a place on the A List and a Recommended award.