After much deliberation (as always, I choose my toys carefully), I decided to replace my aging E61 with a new phone. The options I had (and everyone else for that matter) are few especially with regards to replacing the E61's hardware capabilities, and of course, it's screen size and very usable QWERTY keypad. Of course, I had a few criteria other than just finding a phone with all the the hardware goodness of the E61, I was also thinking of taking on another operating system on a mobile device. Namely Windows and Apple's OS on the iPhone. I was getting pretty fed up with the rather one-dimensional S60 (Symbian platform) and have to admit I was very impressed with Apple's slick GUI on the iPhone 3G. It helped that it's release was just about the same time when I was looking to get rid of my E61. Windows was looking pretty good with it's expandibility and very good synchronisation with the Windows OSes on the computer.
I used to own a couple of Palm phones, and sad to say the Palm OS and its phones are a shadow of their former selves, hence why I skipped over that OS completely. Blackberry's nice I suppose, but most of their phones are butt ugly in my opinion, with maybe the exception of the Blackberry Bold, but it's probably not hitting Singapore's shores so I gave that a miss too.
However, there are plus and minuses to everything and these are the main reasons why I finally settled with a Nokia/Symbian again:
1) Windows is a powerful software, with much support and stuff on it's side, but it's one resource-heavy OS too, till date, there hasn't been any phones that are sleek and have the hardware to be able to run it at 'decent' enough speeds to my liking, so I decided against the platform. Besides, I believe the only phone at the moment that has the features or is attractive enough to me that is using the Windows OS is the Samsung Omnia, which is somewhat clunky for a mobile phone if you ask me. Although I have to say, their Soul phone with a touch-sensitive screen for a D-pad is a somewhat brilliant evolution in the right direction for how people interact or use their mobiles.
2) The next big OS is of course, Apple's OS for the iPhone. For me, it's the prettiest and most user-friendly OS for mobiles in the market at the moment, and not to mention the best executed. Let's be objective here guys, the 'stock' OS on the iPhone looks a million times better than anything Symbian and Windows has in any of the phones. But that's about it that's in the iPhone's favour, it's plainly obvious that Steve Jobs and Co. never planned for the iPhone in it's current incarnation to be used as more than just a 'fun' phone. To me, its more an iPod with a phone function rather than a phone proper. However, I do believe the iPhone 3G is but a stepping stone for more serious business and whatever other kinds of phones for Apple, and it can only get more interesting in time to come, but the current iPhones are just not what I'm looking for.
So with all these limitations and misgivings about most of the offerings on the market, I had to do a double-take on the E71, which I had predicted is coming (it's not that hard if you bother to notice how Nokia releases all their previous phones), but was pretty underwhelmed when I looked at the specs (you can find them anywhere online, I shall only elaborate those that matter to me in this post). Then I realized, it was hard to have anything new, since the original E61 had almost every GSM band on the known planet, plus CDMA as an option, bluetooth, infrared, etc. The biggest problem I had with the E61 was Nokia's annoying and moronic decision to use their own proprietary dataports which totally suck and are totally useless and do no favours for their boast about having good design for users. So let's look at what the E71 had to offer that was one-up (for me) on the E61.
I used to own a couple of Palm phones, and sad to say the Palm OS and its phones are a shadow of their former selves, hence why I skipped over that OS completely. Blackberry's nice I suppose, but most of their phones are butt ugly in my opinion, with maybe the exception of the Blackberry Bold, but it's probably not hitting Singapore's shores so I gave that a miss too.
However, there are plus and minuses to everything and these are the main reasons why I finally settled with a Nokia/Symbian again:
1) Windows is a powerful software, with much support and stuff on it's side, but it's one resource-heavy OS too, till date, there hasn't been any phones that are sleek and have the hardware to be able to run it at 'decent' enough speeds to my liking, so I decided against the platform. Besides, I believe the only phone at the moment that has the features or is attractive enough to me that is using the Windows OS is the Samsung Omnia, which is somewhat clunky for a mobile phone if you ask me. Although I have to say, their Soul phone with a touch-sensitive screen for a D-pad is a somewhat brilliant evolution in the right direction for how people interact or use their mobiles.
2) The next big OS is of course, Apple's OS for the iPhone. For me, it's the prettiest and most user-friendly OS for mobiles in the market at the moment, and not to mention the best executed. Let's be objective here guys, the 'stock' OS on the iPhone looks a million times better than anything Symbian and Windows has in any of the phones. But that's about it that's in the iPhone's favour, it's plainly obvious that Steve Jobs and Co. never planned for the iPhone in it's current incarnation to be used as more than just a 'fun' phone. To me, its more an iPod with a phone function rather than a phone proper. However, I do believe the iPhone 3G is but a stepping stone for more serious business and whatever other kinds of phones for Apple, and it can only get more interesting in time to come, but the current iPhones are just not what I'm looking for.
So with all these limitations and misgivings about most of the offerings on the market, I had to do a double-take on the E71, which I had predicted is coming (it's not that hard if you bother to notice how Nokia releases all their previous phones), but was pretty underwhelmed when I looked at the specs (you can find them anywhere online, I shall only elaborate those that matter to me in this post). Then I realized, it was hard to have anything new, since the original E61 had almost every GSM band on the known planet, plus CDMA as an option, bluetooth, infrared, etc. The biggest problem I had with the E61 was Nokia's annoying and moronic decision to use their own proprietary dataports which totally suck and are totally useless and do no favours for their boast about having good design for users. So let's look at what the E71 had to offer that was one-up (for me) on the E61.
1) Inbuilt camera: not a deal breaker, but it's a nice to have, although the camera as some reviewers online have mentioned, is pathetic and old (like 2001 old, and I agree wholeheartedly with them), it's like if you can't do something at least basically decent, then don't bother and save yourselves the trouble, still it will do for the occasional need to snap something I suppose.
2) Check out that sexy design! Received glowing approvals from my colleagues at work, all admitting it's one very slim and handsome phone (mind you most of them have a PDA phone). The main thing that Nokia got going for the E71 was they finally redesigned the damn phone (I was half-expecting them to actually reuse the E61 base template again like they did for the E61i -lazy buggers-), and did a pretty sweet job of it. It's all shiny and metallic, rather than plasticky like some of their newer N-series phones which is such a waste in my humble opinion. And it's magnificently thin, 10mm according to the specs, but feels more like 8-9mm (4 SD cards are about 10mm for anyone who's interested).
3) New hardware:
- microusb (FINALLY! USB YO! NOT YOUR DAMNED DATAPORTS ! -end rant-)
- newer generation ARM 11 369Mhz processor - improved speeds in menus and especially when surfing the internet, graphics intensive sites like flickr and a local lomography forum were loaded as fast as it can get on a mobile, I trust the expanded ROM/SDRAM has something to do with it too
- 5-way scroll key which is only slightly better than the 'joystick' of the E61
- bluetooth with A2DP
- thankfully, Nokia also decided to keep the IR port (so I can interface with my Fujifilm Pivi)
- bigger inbuilt ROM/SDRAM helps with the speed
- microSD up to 8gb (good for storing pictures, office files and songs)
- To be fair, the screen looks a lot crisper, that's also because the pitch of the pixels have been reduced, given the significant size reduction from the E61/i versions to the current physical incarnation, the color is more natural too, with color-corrected photos looking absolutely fantastic on the screen. However, the screen is still just a puny 2.36", not very conducive for staring at your photos for too long.
4) Significant software improvements:
- S60 V3.1 (sadly not the FP2, hope to have a free update from Nokia -if they want to retain this customer)
- Better interoperability with windows office files (apparently, haven't tried this yet though)
- more useful calendar - very nice with the appointments of the day listed on the side of the monthly view, might be a little too small for the older consumers, especially those with eyesight issues, people like my parents would definitely have a hard time with it.
- somewhat better contacts (minor improvements)
- hook-up with flickr, but sucky camera = kinda pointless but nice all the same
- windows messenger (I use msn a lot on the go, so for Nokia to provide this in the phone is pretty nice)
- all sent messages (SMS) are now archived, rather than the last 20 SMSes sent out restriction on the E61 and probably the E61i.
That's about all for the good parts, now, the glaringly huge problems with the phone:
1) Why can't we slim down and still maintain size?
1) Why can't we slim down and still maintain size?
- Smaller screen. 2.8" > 2.36" not cool man. Not cool at all.
- smaller keypad. not cool too, but I can still handle it, it's not as bad as I feared.
- here we go again, Nokia and their moronic proprietary 2.5mm audio jacks. Sony and their MS Duo sticks is inane, 2.5mm audio jacks? COME ON NOKIA, first the dataports, now this??! Major Fail.
2) Why did Nokia take away some of the function keys?! I mean, if you're gonna leave the grey Fn key, why don't you leave the damn underscore, backslash, ampersand, dollar and equal on the keypad dammit?!?! Bewilderment much. I wonder if Nokia is having trouble retaining talent or designers with a little common sense. (hint for Nokia: notice QWEASDZXC have no Fn keys assigned to them now??)
Anyway, that's about all I have to say about the Nokia E71 so far, I only talked about the major issues that matter with respect to how I use the phone, so if you want more details of other parts of the phone, make use of google. I may or may not add more to this review-like post in the future.
Cheers~
*added some comments in blue, after having spent more time with the phone*
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