A Review Of The Nokia E71
My Nokia E71 arrived on Tuesday, I’ve had a few days to play around with it so thought I’d write up my impression of it so far. There will be a few negatives within this review but that’s not to say its a bad phone, its just that there are already lots of reviews out there focusing on the specifications and features of the phone so I’m not going to go over ground that has been covered by others, and much better than I could do. If you want to read a really good review check out the one by Steve Litchfield on allaboutsymbian.com
I had never seen or touched the E71 until it arrived, it looks slim and nice in photos but they don’t do it justice, it isn’t until you have one in your hand that you realise just how nice it is, and the build quality is the best of any phone I’ve used. Compared to my old E61 which I bought it to replace its in another league, it beats the E61 in every aspect except maybe the keyboard. So on to my likes and dislikes.
Likes:-
Look, feel, build quality, form factor are all amazing. Its a very solid device, so squeaks when using it, no rattles when you shake it, its the best built phone I’ve used, and probably the best build quality of any s60 Nokia EVER!
The auto word completion and word suggestion work really well once you get used to it. If I type theyer it automatically corrects it to they’re but with an option to choose exactly what I typed if I wish to chose it. It isn’t perfect but it comes very close and makes email creation much quicker and easier if you are wanting it to look professional and not just something you entered lazily to sent to a friend.
The keyboard once you get used to it is very nice and responsive, though the keys may be a little small and tightly packed for anyone with large thumbs. Due to it being more compact than the E61/E61i or the E62 entering text one handed is much easier, on its predecessors it was possible but awkward, not so with the E71, its just as easy as doing it with a regular numeric keypad.
Now for the negatives.
Things I don’t like or could have been improved:-
I said the keyboard was a pleasure to use but this is only if you have slim to average size thumbs, for people with large thumbs I can see them struggling with the compact nature of it. Also a lot of the symbols that were previously on the keys of the E61 etc are no longer there, £ $ € had a place on keys A S and D but now you need to go into the character menu to select them, just like you do on an N series device. Also the right hand shift key has been removed, not a problem for most people but for left handers like myself who used to highlight text using right shift and move the dpad with our left hand we now have to adapt to the right hand way of doing it.
The ports. It uses a micro usb port and a 2.5mm headphone port. Now I know the device is thin but surely they could have squeezed in a more standard 3.5mm and mini usb port. On the back of the phone where the camera is it bulges out slightly, this is directly in line with the headphone socket. All they needed to do was run this bulge the full width of the phone, move the usb port in line with it and they could easily fit in 3.5mm and mini usb.
That’s it really for negatives, it would be nice to have a better camera etc but for a phone that’s mainly aimed at the corporate market the camera is more than adequate, it just doesn’t match up with the likes of some of the N series phones with 5 mega pixel Carl Zeiss optics.
Everything else about the phone has been covered elsewhere so I’ve only focused on things that I have experienced but not seen mentioned elsewhere. The E71 is a fantastic QWERTY phone, I absolutly love using it, but would I have it as my only phone? Tough question, probably not. I do like my N95-8GB and the multimedia power that it has over the E71. On the first 2 day of owning it I would have definatly said no, but the more I use it the more I grow to love it. If it wasn’t for the 2.5mm headphone port and the inferior camera to the N95 then yes I could quite easily live with the E71 as my only phone.
This entire review was created on the E71 using the built in version of QuickOffice and the phones keyboard.
