last100 » E71

My favorite smartphone just got superseded

Steve O'Hear — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 12:10:34 +0000

Nokia E72

I get through a fair number of smartphones here at last100 HQ — hey, it’s my job — but there’s one handset that continues to be my primary device. I’m talking about the Nokia E71, which admittedly doesn’t have the fun factor of the iPhone and nearly as many quality third-party apps (I have an iPod touch to compensate) but does have the best QWERTY keyboard on a mobile device that I’ve ever used, in a form factor that is perfect for my own particular needs.

Today, the Nokia E71 got superseded by a new handset from Nokia, the E72, which thankfully keeps the physical design relatively untouched, improves the keyboard layout, and ups the fairly feeble camera (my main complaint of the E71) to a more respectable 5 megapixels capable of shooting 30 15 fps VGA video.

Another “fix” is the addition of a 3.5mm head phone jack, replacing the 2.5mm one on the E71. There’s also a mini trackpad sitting in the middle of the D-pad for easier scrolling through email messages and web pages.

The OS has also been upgraded to S60 3rd Edition FP2, which adds a few user interface refinements and should be speedier too.

Another potential selling point of the E72 is that it comes with a lifetime subscription to Nokia’s own push email service. This is a messaging oriented device after all.

Besides the keyboard, the other reason why I’ve stuck with the E71 is that I’m able to operate it one handed, particularly important to me as my disability poses dexterity issues for devices that need to be supported by two hands, such as certain touch screen models or those that feature a landscape keyboard. It’s not that I can’t use or test those devices, I’m just not as efficient using them (try driving an electric wheelchair while texting). That’s why I celebrate the amount of competition between mobile handset makers, with different form factors flooding the market in recognition that one size doesn’t fit all.

In terms of third-party apps, my E71 is currently loaded with: Skype (via carrier 3), YouTube, Gmail, Nokia Messaging, BBC iPlayer (yay!), SkyFire, Gravity (Twitter), eBuddy (multiple IM), and Google Maps, to name just a few.

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Hands-on: Nokia E75 (hardware preview and pics)

Steve O'Hear — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 20:51:16 +0000

Regular readers of this blog will know that I’m a huge fan of Nokia’s QWERTY-touting E71 and currently use the device as my primary smartphone, along with testing a whole bunch of new handsets. That said, I’m as fickle as the next geek, and ever since Nokia announced the upcoming E75, which also features a full QWERTY keyboard but in a very different form factor to the E71, I’ve been eying it up as a potential replacement. Earlier this week I scored a pre-production unit (on loan only) and so rather than waiting to do a full review I thought I’d post my first hands-on impressions and a few photos to go with it.

I wasn’t entirely sure if I’d like the E75’s form factor, which is a little reminiscent of the old Nokia Communicator, but I was pleasantly surprised. The device combines both a numeric keyboard and slide-out QWERTY, and features a 2.4″ 320 x 240 pixel (QVGA) screen. When closed, this makes the E75 resemble a typical, albeit slightly tall, candy bar phone. Slide out the QWERTY keyboard, however, and the screen orientates to landscape mode, turning the E75 into a very capable messaging device. While the keys on the QWERTY are pretty flat – almost flush with the surface – they’re quite large and have just enough travel to give adequate feedback. Having said that, they do take a bit of getting used to and, for the time being at least, I still prefer the keyboard on the E71.

The thing that’s really impressed me about the E75 is that Nokia has managed to keep the device relatively slim despite featuring a full QWERTY slider, especially compared to some of the company’s N-series phones and those of its competitors (I’m looking at you G1). In fact, looks-wise, the device has a really high end feel to it, just like the E71 (see above comparison shot) and all of the recent E-series phones, featuring metal trim lines and back cover, with a very solid overall build.

One area where the E75 definitely trumps the E71 is the 3.5mm head phone jack. And while I haven’t had a chance to test out the camera properly and don’t have the highest expectations – 3.2 megapixels, autofocus and LED flash – it is capable of shooting 30 fps video, up from a miserly 15 fps on the E71.

Over the next few weeks I’ll delve into the software – S60 3rd edition feature pack 2 – and bundled apps, along with testing the camera properly. If you have any questions in the mean time, leave a comment.

(Note: all of the above photos were taken with a Nokia N85 – see my hands-on)

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Review: Nokia E71 (my favorite smartphone yet?)

Steve O'Hear — Mon, 15 Sep 2008 16:03:28 +0000

I’m a great believer that when it comes to choice of smartphone, one size doesn’t fit all. As much as we like the iPhone here at last100, for example, particularly for its industry leading mobile web browser and fast growing library of third-party applications, for my personal needs it doesn’t quite fit the bill. Enter Nokia’s new QWERTY smartphone, the business-oriented E71, which along with addressing most of its predecessors’ shortcomings (the E61/E61i) is a device that comes incredibly close to meeting all of my own particular requirements. Which, of course, isn’t to say that it will meet yours, although it may well do.

Claiming to be the world’s slimmest cell phone with a QWERTY keyboard, the E71 is highly pocketable, especially compared to Nokia’s earlier attempts. It also looks the business in other ways, using a stylish blend of stainless steel and ‘grey’ high density plastic, resulting in a very solid feeling build.

Spec-wise, the version of the E71 for review was the UK version, a Quad-band GSM /3G phone with HSDPA, EDGE, GPRS and WiFi data support.

There’s obviously, as ever, a degree of compromise between the size of the device, screen and keyboard — however, in the case of the E71, Nokia may have found the sweet spot. The QVGA screen is bright and maintains a productive 320 x 240 pixels in dimension, and the QWERTY keyboard, although tightly packed, is one of the best I’ve used. Key presses on the E71 are far less spongy than on the E61 (or Nokia’s latest Internet tablet), providing enough tactile feedback without requiring too much pressure to register. Nokia have also found room for four keyboard short cuts, dedicated ‘home’, ‘calendar’, ‘address book’ and ‘email’ keys, all of which can be re-mapped to launch your own choice of application. Additionally, holding down each of the shortcut keys for a few seconds will trigger a different action, such as entering a new appointment in ‘calendar’ or a new contact in ‘address book’, and again all of these can be customized, as is the case with almost any element of Nokia’s updated S60 User Interface. Another nice touch is that if you start typing a person’s name while on the home screen, the E71 will instantly drill down into your address book.

The E71’s choice of directional-pad over a pointy joystick or Blackberry-style trackball is also a welcome change, and proved great for navigating around the device, scrolling through documents or browsing the web, and even a dose of casual gaming. The d-pad also functions as an indicator light informing you when there’s a new SMS message, email or missed call.

Down the left-hand side of the E71 is a microSD slot and a mini-USB port, both concealed by a rubber door, and on the right-hand side are volume up and down controls, as well as one-touch voice record and a 2.5mm headphone jack.

The E71 also has two cameras, where the original E61 had none. There’s a 3.2 megapixel stills camera which is also capable of shooting QVGA video at 15 fps, along with a front-facing cam to support 3G video calling.

Overall, however, the E71’s media production features are a little disappointing. For example, on the software side, while the E71’s camera nicely integrates with Nokia’s Ovi web service, enabling photos to be instantly shared on Flickr, the quality of the captured images aren’t great (especially compared to the industry leading cameras found on Nokia’s flagship N-series phones, such as the N95). Bottom line: this is no camera phone, which although makes some sense considering the E71’s intended market, it leaves us wishing that Nokia would release an E71-like QWERTY smartphone with the media production goodness of its high end consumer-oriented phones.

Having said that, media playback features are pretty decent for a business-oriented smartphone. The E71 can handle the usual audio formats, MP3, AAC and Windows Media Audio etc. and on the video side there’s support for MPEG4 and H.264 (along with other codecs), both needed for watching video podcasts. Talking of which, Nokia has bundled its own excellent podcast client, which enables you to subscribe to pretty much any podcast and download episodes over WiFi or 3G (no need to side-load iPod-style). There’s also the Nokia music store application and a built-in FM tuner.

Of course, where the E71 really excels is in its more natural territory, email and all round business features. As you’d expect, the E71 supports Microsoft Exchange for email, contacts, and calendar syncing, along with MS Office document creation and reading. Standard email accounts are also accessible and Nokia has gone out of its way to make email set-up a breeze, requiring just a username and password for most services, such as GMail or Yahoo. Notably, however, there is no longer support for Blackberry Connect. For my own push email requirements I signed up to Nokia’s solution, which is currently free on Nokia Beta Labs. There are also a number of additional business applications bundled, such as remote wipe, PDF reader, a VPN client, and an advanced call manager, the latter of which can block or filter known callers.

Web browsing on the E71 is a delight, in part because of its landscape oriented screen. Of course, at 320 pixels wide this isn’t enough on its own to eliminate endless horizontal scrolling in order to view the ‘full’ web. Thankfully, Nokia’s S60 web browser does an excellent job of subtly re-flowing columns of text, and similar to Opera Mobile, uses a panel view to help you navigate around a page before zooming in. Nokia has also added support for the latest version of Flash Lite, enabling access to the full version of YouTube. Best of all, however, is that compared with previous Nokia phones, the E71 has enough processing power to render and move around web pages smoothly. In fact, the E71 is notably snappy running almost almost all of its applications, suggesting that this time round Nokia has ensured that the hardware meets its software ambitions.

Bundled with the E71 is Nokia Maps, a competitor to other mapping services such as Google Maps. In addition to the basic mapping client, for a monthly subscription full turn-by-turn directions can be switched on and additional maps and guides downloaded. While this can prove expensive compared to a dedicated GPS offering, it can work out more cost effective if you just want to rent a particular map as a one-off for a month whilst taking a vacation. The E71 utilizes A-GPS, and we found it to be surprisingly quick at locating our whereabouts, although we haven’t tested it in a turn-by-turn situation.

Third-party applications

Although the S60 platform doesn’t have nearly the breadth and quality of third-party applications that already exist on the iPhone – the software library seems dominated by to-do lists and business apps that duplicate functionality – I’ve installed the following apps in addition to those that came bundled with the E71:

GMail – used as an occasional alternative to the E71’s built-in email client or Nokia’s push solution, purely for its archive search capability.
Tiny Twitter – a fairly decent Twitter client.
Shozu – for instant publishing of media to Facebook and YouTube.
Google Maps – as an alternative to Nokia Maps.
Mobbler – a Last.fm client.
Conversation – Nokia’s threaded SMS client.

Verdict

If I had to sum up my liking for the E71, much of it is down to the form factor. Packing in a very usable QWERTY keyboard into such a pocketable device is impressive, although admittedly I do have small hands so your own millage may vary. That coupled with the device’s overall responsiveness, bundled applications and a number of welcome improvements to S60’s User Interface, have made it a joy to use. Add decent web browsing and media playback to the mix, superb call quality and extremely good battery life – thanks to a 1500mAh battery – and the E71 is my favorite smartphone yet.

Recent smartphone reviews: HTC Touch Diamond and Samsung Tocco SGH-F480

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