e-ignite: Tech

The Nokia E71 Smartphone

So I recently bought myself a Nokia E71 – the first phone that I’ve actually “wanted” for quite some time. My initial impressions are generally excellent and I’ve enjoyed making good use of it, so I thought I’d put together a review of my experience with the handset. I’ve had it for just over a month, so the experience I’ve had with it will hopefully help you make a decision about the phone if you’re interested.

The Looks
Firstly, the looks. It’s the best looking business phone by far – IMO it looks much tidier than the qwerty Blackberry offerings that are available, most likely to do with how thin the phone is. If you lay it flat on a surface, the screen sits slightly higher than the width of a plastic CD case off the surface. The phone feels thinner than this though, since the camera housing protrudes from the back slightly. The metal battery cover is very nice to touch, although it does get badly fingerprinted with use and this appears to be unavoidable.
From a purely operational point of view, the phone is going to have to last at least 18 months – you therefore don’t want it to look scratched or generally worn. I invested in an Invisible Shield for the screen of mine and I was quite happy to pay a few dollars for peace of mind. Generally, the phone doesn’t seem to be too scratch prone, but the chromed plate on the front where the microphone is does seem to mark. As I’ve said, I’ve had my E71 for just over a month and there are light scratch marks. The metal back, camera lens and sides don’t seem to have marked at all however, so I don’t feel that Full Body protection from the likes of the Invisible Shield is necessary, but if you think that light scratches on the microphone plate might bother you, then I’d recommend buying an Invisible Shield and only covering the screen and plate.

The phone comes with a plastic case to keep it scratch free, however I was extremely disappointed in the one I got. It seems to be made from some kind of pressed plastic with a thin fabric material covering on the inside. Along the opening edge of my case, there is a sharp “tag” hanging off the plastic and I simply didn’t use it because I thought it would scratch the phone. My impression of the case is not good – it’s cheap, plastic and feels pretty crappy. If you think you’re getting a nice case to go with it, think again. If you must have a case with your E71, you’ll need to buy one separately.

As a phone
As a phone, I’ve found the E71 pretty easy to use. The menus and operations you need to go through are pretty straightforward, and the contacts search is extremely useful. The small numeric buttons on the keyboard are surprisingly simple to use, and it doesn’t take too long to get used to the zero, * and # keys being to the right hand side of the rest of the keypad. The raised dot on the 5 key is very useful.
Call quality seems to be excellent, and the range of volumes both in-call and of the ringer are good. The one disappointing thing about it is that the vibration alert seems pretty weak – in silent mode, the phone only vibrates once so on the move it can be easy to miss an incoming SMS message or email.

Thanks to the qwerty keyboard, text messaging is a breeze and you can definitely type messages faster than on a standard phone with predictive text. The problem with this is that you get used to sending out long emails, and you can type so quickly that you’ll end up sending way more multi-part SMS messages than you used to! The predictive messaging is subject to a few irritations though…

Predictive messaging
You have an option to use predictive messaging that essentially auto-corrects some spelling errors, or predicts what you’re about to type and allows you to accept the longer word after typing in a few characters. This isn’t perfect thought, and I’ve found a number of limitations:
Firstly, as soon as you type a long word, it’s remembered forever. I typed something like “Holier-than-thou” once (I din’t actually use this, but can’t remember the exact phrase) and now every time I start typing “Hol”, I am offered that as opposed to something sensible like “Holiday” or “Holding” or, in fact, any of these. It’s a small issue since you can select another word from the up/down menu, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to get rid of words you no longer want to be offered.

Secondly, the auto-correct function can’t deal with commas. By far the most common error I make when typing something is to press “,” instead of “m” – when you do that, the predictive text stops working and moves on to the next word, meaning you need to go back and fix it yourself. Yes, I know it’s a minor issue, but it seems to be all that I end up correcting these days!
On the plus side though, it’s extremely easy to teach the E71 a word. Simply type it in, and if it’s trying to correct it when you don’t want it to, press up on the D-Pad and it’s learned. It’s also very good at picking up small errors, and it speeds up typing generally, so I’d certainly recommend that you leave it switched on rather than off.

I should also add at this point that I own an iPod Touch, and absolutely without a doubt, I find it far easier to type on the Nokia E71. On devices such as the Touch and the iPhone, it’s very easy to accidentally push extra buttons or have “fat-finger syndrome” and simply miss your keys. The E71 keyboard is well laid out, and the keys are shaped in such a way as to be easy to feel and type on despite being small. Having physical keys to touch is and always will be ultimately preferable to use than a touch screen. In my opinion anyway.
As an email / communications device

The E71 is excellent at email and messaging. The built-in email client is very easy to use, and it automatically configures itself to accounts such as Gmail (or Google Apps like I use). I’ve not had any problems getting this to work and being able to receive and send email so easily on the move is a big plus. Despite what a lot of people seem to suggest, the E71 supports push email either through its Mail for Exchange app or using the Nokia Email service. I’m quite happy retrieving my email using IMAP though.

The built-in mail client doesn’t directly support html, although you can open any html attachments from an email quite easily in the web browser (you just click on the attachment in mail and it opens for you). The only issue I’ve had with the email client is that it doesn’t always mark your email as read on the server when you open it on your device. Again, this isn’t a big issue, and it doesn’t happen all the time. But it would be nice for that to be fixed.

In terms of retrieving your email, you have two options: Auto Retrieve and Mail Notifications.
Auto Retrieve automatically connects to your mailbox even if the mail app is closed, downloads all your new emails and notifies you via a tone / vibration that you have new email. This is extremely useful, and you can even configure it to automatically check on certain days and you can change the interval between checks. Again, slightly annoying, but you can have a range of times from 5 minutes to 6 hours – there seems to be a missing magic number in there though, because you can choose 30 mins or 2 hours, but nothing in between. I would’ve liked it to check once an hour…

Email Notifications: As far as I can tell (and I say this because the documentation in the manual on this feature is “minimal” to be kind), the notifications simply alert you if you receive a new email – the phone will play a tone and / or vibrate depending on the profile you are using. However, I believe you need to have your email account open in the background and be constantly connected to the web. Personally, I don’t really see the point unless you have push email enabled. Even then, the hit on the battery life would probably not be worth it.
As a multimedia device

The Nokia E71 is not a multimedia device. If that’s what you’re looking for, look elsewhere. The built-in web browser is ok – it displays html reasonably well, and you can even watch flash videos on the likes of youtube. It has its limitations though, and when loading a particularly large / multimedia rich website, it’s prone to simply closing. For casual web-browsing, checking train and bus times, reading the news etc, it’s absolutely fine. It should be noted, however, that the iPhone web browser is far superior – it’s simply no comparison, nor do I see the E71’s browser even coming close. But I’m comfortable with that.

The camera
Well, it’s not good. Images it takes are grainy, and when you get them onto your computer you would be fantastically surprised they were from a 3.2 megapixel camera. In very good light conditions, it does the job, but if you’re out on a night out, indoors etc, the results are pretty woeful. I would say, however, that this is comparable to several devices in the same league as the E71.
The phone displays videos via Real Player without any problems (although the lack of support for .wmv files is both surprising and mildly annoying) and you can view photos just fine. Music playback isn’t fantastic, but it’s functional. The lack of a 3.5mm headphone jack makes it a poor choice if you want to use your phone for listening to music on the move though. It does offer some good features on the music front though – online radio and an FM tuner. For casual listening with the supplied Nokia hands-free it’s fine.
The 3G HSDPA connection is superbly fast (when you’re within a coverage area) and I never fail to be impressed with the speed when on the move.

GPS
The GPS system (A-GPS, Assisted GPS) is excellent and I’ve found it to be quick and accurate at locating the position. You can also use it to calculate your speed, average speed, trip distance etc, so it can provide hours of fun on the train or on a long car journey! I didn’t get a trial of route directions with my Nokia Maps installation, but I’ve found that much the same functionality (without audible turn-by-turn directions) can be found with Google’s Maps app.

Syncing your data
I found it a bit frustrating that unless you install a load of third party apps and register on various websites, it’s not possible to sync your calendar to the likes of Google Calendar (or Google Apps Calendar). It is possible (see instructions at E71 Fanatics) but I felt that it was a bit too much like effort. In the end, I registered with Nokia’s free Ovi service which lets you sync your E71 Calendar, Contacts, To-Do lists etc with an online Ovi account over-the-air. You can’t export the data from Ovi however, so it pretty much serves as a backup rather than a working calendar. It is good though, and I’ve not had any problems with the service.

Apps
There are a number of apps available for free via the “Download!” option in the E71’s menu (and more recently, but arguably less successfully, via the Ovi Store). I’ve tried a number of apps, but there is only one that I think is absolutely worth having: BirdStep SmartConnect.

This app allows you to set up a list and hierarchy of your connection access points which it will cycle through until it finds an available connection. This means that you can make your phone automatically detect if you are within Wi-Fi range of a known network, and if you are, it will connect you via Wi-Fi. If not, you’ll be connected via your mobile  network. You can then set SmartConnect as your default access point for all your programs (such as Mail, Web Browser etc) and you’ll be automatically connected to the best available network without being asked how you want to connect every time. It’s brilliant.

There is an app that I would not recommend – Skyfire browser. I read on a number of sites that it was excellent, it handled flash well etc, but I found it to be quite unstable and I wasn’t keen on the terms and conditions that basically stated if you used their browser, you had no right to privacy whatsoever.

The “Download!” menu is full of apps that sound like a good idea, but unfortunately many of them require you to register to use them before you can even try them out. This isn’t a limitation of the E71 of course, it’s the app store that Nokia have implemented.

The Verdict
I love my E71. It has its pros and cons, but generally the wide range of capabilities as a phone, email and messaging device, basic web browser and GPS system are superb. I thoroughly recommend it to anyone who is in the market for this kind of handset.