E71 Detailed Review Part 1: Phyical

This is the first part in a four part series of posts on the E71. The first part will cover the physical aspects of the E71 (build quality, keyboard, etc). The second part will cover the E71's capabilities as a business phone and will include PIM functions, messaging, document editing, creation of documents, and Maps. The third part will cover third party applications and will include applications that I feel are essential, including how these applications perform on the E71. The fourth and final segment of this article will be a summary comparison of the E71 with the Nokia flagship communicator, the E90.

The first thing you notice when you pickup an E71 is how good it feels in your hand. The build quality of this phone exceeds the build quality of every other mobile phone I've ever held. It is solid and thin, almost unbelievably thin. I don't know how the Nokia engineers were able to put so much into such a small package. The phone is mostly metal, including the back cover, with only a little high quality plastic at the top and bottom.

Next there is the keyboard, which was my biggest concern when I first saw the E71. You simply cannot have a large keyboard on such a small device. That said, after several days of heavy use, I have found the keyboard to be very usable. The keys are convex in shape allowing you to easily feel each key. They also have a good travel such that you know when you have actually pressed a key. My previous phone was an E90, a truly great phone, but with a keyboard that was only adequate. While bigger and somewhat easier to type on than the E71, the key travel was very short and it is sometimes difficult to tell by feel that you have pressed the key adequately. I don't think I'd want to write War and Peace on either the E71 or the E90 but the E71's keyboard does provides much better feedback than the E90's. Given the size of the E71's keyboard this feedback is an absolute necessity; without it, the E71's keyboard would have been unusable. As it is, the E71 is fine for email, SMS and reviewing documents but I would have to give the E90 a slight edge when it comes to creating large documents.

The E71's screen is very bright and clear, even in the strong sunshine of a Texas summer day. As a result, web browsing is simply a joy. I have only encountered one page that the updated S60 browser choked on a little and surprisingly, it was Nokia's home page. I fail to understand why Nokia's home page does not recognize their own browser but that's the way it is. However, reading CNN, AAS, Symbian Guru, and My-Symbian the browser has been great. YouTube videos play flawlessly, as do flash videos.

The E71's battery is huge and is actually the same battery used by the E61/61i/62 and the E90. In several days of very heavy use I have still be able to get through two days before needing a recharge. That said, one thing that was brought to my attention by one of my colleagues participating in the "collective seeding" test is that there does not appear to be an audible alert when the battery gets low. When this was first identified to me I thought my colleague must have been mistaken so I deliberately drove the battery to it's limit and there was no audible alert. A visual message appeared on the screen alerting me that the battery was low but there was no sound. I haven't figured out yet if this is because of a setting or if it's by design but I will pursue it further. It's not really a big deal for me but does seem a little odd.

The right site of the E71 consists of volume buttons, the voice dialing/command button and a 2.5 mm headset port. I was very pleasantly surprised to discover that the voice dialing button no longer brings up the voice recorder with a short press. This has been a complaint of mine on nearly every mobile device I've ever owned. A long press of this button (perhaps 2 seconds) activates the speaker independent voice dialing. This function seems to work better than on both of my previous S60 3rd edition devices, where it was essentially unusable because the repeat back of the name was so soft that it could not be heard and on my E90 where it actually caused the phone to crash. While still not overly loud, it can be heard and also brings up a dialog allowing you to select other possible matches. If a selection is not made within a few seconds, it dials the default number of the person whose name was repeated back. While this is an improvement from earlier S60 3rd edition devices, you are still stuck with calling only the default number. It would be nice if you were given an audible choice of which number to dial for a contact (i.e. mobile, home, business, etc).

The bottom of the E71 contains only the power port and the top contains a red power button and the loudspeaker, which works quite well. The left side of the devise contains the micro SD card slot and micro USB port, both covered by a plastic flap.