E71 Collective Seeding Test

The great and very cool people at WOM World have sent five E71s for me and four of my colleagues to use for a month (thanks Dons). I received the devices today and passed the out with great fanfare. My initial impressions however are a little mixed. The E71 is fast, thin, sexy, and fast. It's also very fast. I've never before seen any mobile devise even come close to the speed of the E71, there is literally no lag after executing a command. Web browsing is as fast on the E71 as it is on my desktop (a 2.93 GIG Quad Core). As I haven't had time for much more than setting up the E71, that's it for the pros so far. The con is that the reception problems reported on various web sites are accurate. The E71s antenna is located at the bottom of the device, where you would normally hold the phone. If you hold the E71 at the bottom you will experience signal degradation and possible loss of signal. I have performed several tests at my home, which despite being in relatively close proximity to a cell tower has always experienced flaky reception. My old Nokia 6310i and E60 had no signal most of the time but walking up or down the street just a couple hundred feet would give me full bars. However, the E61/E62 and my E90 usually had a good signal. As for the E71, I have observed that as long as you keep your hand away from the bottom of the phone, the E71's signal is comparable to my E90. I have not yet tested the E71 in an area where the signal is strong but I will to determine if the signal strength is a factor. Regardless, the placement of the antenna was an unfortunate design compromise on the part of the Nokia engineers and only time will tell how annoying it turns out to be and will depend on how easy it is to break old habits.

Over the next four weeks, my colleagues and I will be putting the E71 through it's paces, testing it's general usability, it's native applications, and it's performance in a variety of real world situations, including how it runs many third party applications. If there is a particular function or application that you'd like tested, please leave me a comment and we'll do our best to to test it out. As these are all the European version of the E71, I will be unable to test the 3G functions. Also, if you have any questions, leave me a comment and I'll do my best to answer them.