In praise of the E71

2009 June 18 at 05:59 » Tagged as :

When the Camera on my phone died, it turned me off the E71 and even Nokia. But now the camera has been replaced by Nokia Care and my faith in them has been restored. I am beginning to get quite a liking for this phone. This is the first time I've been so happy with a phone since the days of my Siemens S55 (now that was a real phone).

At first I had my reservations about the qwerty keyboard but it really does make life a lot easier. It's a bit bigger than my previous phone (an E51) but by no means bulky. The design is rather ergonomic and you hardly feel it in your pocket (as a result, I always leave it lying about here and there).

The qwerty keyboard and the large screen makes it a pleasure to use the phone with Fring. Fring did cause the system to freeze up the first time I installed it but I have not seen a recurrance. However I have not yet been able to configure it's built in SIP client to connect to Asterisk. The large screen makes the phone a hit with the kids. They play tetris on it when stuck in traffic.

If the screen is big the battery is even bigger. With bluetooth and wifi, the E51 can hardly run for a day. The 71 on the other hand seems to be able to keep itself going to at least two.  I did have a spot of bother with the phone refusing to power itself on at times but this went away after a firmware update. Updating the firmware is not easy - you need to have a windows machine for it. Do people still use windows?

The file manager is readily accessible from 'home' it's not buried ten deep in the menu tree like in most other phones. The TTS engine is pretty cool if you want to have your text messages or emails read out to you. Configuring email was quite a breeze. I started of with my gmail address and the phone auto detected all the settings. I am still trying to figure out how it did that.