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End User mobile connectivity

Nokia E71

Nokia E71

 

Nokia kindly sent me an E71 to review. I’m not a gadget man but I have now had a series of Nokia E Series’ which I hope qualifies me to comment on this latest one.

 

I some time ago decided that I would use Nokias for email rather than RIM. BlackBerry at the time did not support WiFi and offered no hope of a VoIP client. Windows mobile devices did not cut it. For me they did not seem to be very good phones to me; clunky with a poor user interface and not a very good battery life.

 

The E Series came along and with it the business mobile range for the future. I thought the E60 was good and was somewhat surprised when it was canned. I put it down to progress. It wasn’t perfect. Pages downloading from the internet frustratingly seemed to do so twice. I put it down to some strange caching process. Still the screen was very clear and I could lie in bed on a Saturday morning reading the paper over my home wireless network.

 

My replacement, taken in order to run mobile voip clients on the latest Nokia device, was the E65 which I thought was great and is what I have been using since it came out. It seemed to be a stabler device although it still locked up from time to time. I eventually worked out that if email was synching some of the other buttons wouldn’t respond – crucially the address book. It still seems to download web pages twice.

 

Cosmetically the paintwork on the E65 rubs off so it doesn’t necessarily stay looking good but this isn’t what turns me on. I would happily carry on using the E65.

 

Enter the E71.

 

What I like about the E71?

 

Old fashioned PDA footprint but is a lot slimmer and slips in the pocket very easily.

Good weight – the Blackberry’s are too light for my liking

Good screen

You can listen to your text messages

On board satnav

WiFi – you can also get software that turns it into a WiFi hoptspot.

Battery life seems reasonably good

 

What don’t I like about it? I need to get a Bluetooth car kit. It isn’t really fair on the device because most modern cars probably have Bluetooth built in but mine is a “Classic” and so I have to switch SIMs to my E65 which has a generic Nokia interface that fits into the car.

 

If that is all I can complain about I think the Nokia E71 does very well. In fact it looks to be a huge step forwards as devices go. Well done Nokia.

Trefor Davies

By Trefor Davies

Liver of life, father of four, CTO of trefor.net, writer, poet, philosopherontap.com

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