E71 Detailed Review Part 3: 3rd Party Applications

The third part of my ongoing review of the Nokia E71 covers how well the E71 runs third party applications. I have been using the E71 as my primary mobile phone for just over two weeks and have installed all of my normal applications, which include the following:

1. Mobisophy Interactive Voice Call Master
2. Truphone (mobile VoIP)
3. Epochware Handy Profile
4. Epochware Handy Clock
5. Epochware Handy Weather
6. Epochware Handy Expense
7. Nokia Mail for Exchange
8. Nokia Email (beta)
9. Telexy SymSMB 3.50
10. JoikuSpot Lite
11. QuickOffice
12. PowerBoot
13. SmartLight
14. SmartphoneWare Tracker
15. mBrain Software Pdf+ (including PDFprinter)

First, all of the "Handy" applications work perfectly, exactly the way you would expect for very mature products. I have had these products on every smartphone I have ever owned and find them very useful. The Expense application is especially useful on business trips and allows you to generate useful reports right on your phone. You can also export the data as a csv file that can then be imported into Excel (or any other spreadsheet application).

I have been using Truphone since me E60 days when it was first released. I was concerned after I trialed the E66 for WOM World, and discovered that Truphone was not support on the E66 (the E66 is now supported by Truphone). However, Truphone fully supports the E71. It’s a great application, it's easy to install over the air after signing up on the Truphone web site, and provides crystal clear Internet calls. When I talk with an old college buddy in Sweden, also a Truphone user (for free), it sounds like he’s in the next room. When I go to a new location, I can run the Truphone application and be making mVoIP calls in less than a minute. Since I started this series of articles, I decided that I liked the E71 so much, I wanted to buy it. Therefore, last week I took delivery of a new E71-2 (the North American version) and have been testing Truphone over 3G in the Dallas area. Again, it works perfectly. The first time I used Truphone over 3G, I thought it was a standard cellular call because it was so clear with absolutely no latency.

The next application is the most powerful mobile application I've ever used, Interactive Voice Call Master (IVCM), which is basically a mobile PBX for your smartphone. As my profile says, I run a small engineering consulting company in Dallas, Texas but I have not used a standard landline telephone in over 4 years. This presented some problems as my company began to grow and I wanted a more professional system to handle incoming calls. I researched several virtual PBX solutions, all of which were more than I needed and difficult to setup. Then I ran across IVCM. This software will act as an answering machine, will filter your calls, and act as a simple PBX. I have both a White List and a Black List setup, where names on the White list are always put through as normal and names on the Black list hear a busy tone. Setting up the lists is easy and names can be easily selected from your contacts. There is also an option to handle "private" numbers where the caller ID is not sent. During normal business hours, I use the Complex Profile, which I have set up to allow incoming callers that are not on my White list (White list callers are put directly through to my phone) are given the option to select 1 for me, 2 - 5 for one of my colleagues, and 6 to leave a message. If the caller selects to one of my colleagues, the software transfers the call to their cell phone by setting up a three-way call. Private numbers are handled in the same way but can easily be given a busy signal instead. During non-business hours, all callers not on my White list are directed to leave a message using the answering machine function. This is a very powerful application a takes a fair amount of "horsepower" to run. Some of the smartphones I've used in the past have "choked" on this application and either crashed or closed the application (in spite of the option to run it as a system application). However, the E71 runs this application without even "breathing" hard.










The next application that I use regularly is SymSMB. I first used this application a couple of years ago but the new version, 3.50, is both much more mature and powerful. This application allows drives on your mobile to be mounted on your PC and your PC drives to be mounted on your mobile phone. Therefore, you can easily transfer files back and forth from/to your PC and mobile phone over wifi. I have even transferred large video files and it works very well and is actually faster than using even USB.

PowerBoot and SmartLight are both very useful little applications. PowerBoot will automatically start any application, native or 3rd party, every time you reboot your phone. I use it to start applications that have no autostart function like SmartLight and the native music application. I like the music application running in the background so that when I get in my car and the E71 links up with my car kit, all have to do is push a button on my car kit to listen to music over my car stereo from my phone. SmartLight is a little application that keeps the back light active on all screens except the active standby screen. I do a lot of reading on my phone, both business reports and eBooks, and found it very annoying to have the back light go out while I was reading something. Both of these applications run flawlessly on the E71.

QuickOffice is another very mature product and the editing version is included on the E71. However, I have upgraded to QuickOffice 5.0 so that I can handle Office 2007 files. While not absolutely perfect, round tripping documents between QuickOffice and MS Office is very nearly perfect. Only occasionally do I notice a formatting problem. If you use your smartphone to review and comment on documents away from the office, QuickOffice is the product to use. I have previously used OfficeSuite, which is similar to QuickOffice, but which I found generated more problems when round tripping documents. Regardless, both of these applications run well on the E71.

Next, I use Tracker to replace the default (native) task switching application. Tracker is similar to Best Taskman and is activated by a long press of the Home (menu) button. Then, like Best Taskman, it displays all of the running application along with a summary of your available memory. However, clicking left then shows the past 10 opened applications and a summary of placed & missed calls and SMSs. A second click to the left then displays an "alternate" desktop where you can add application or files to which you want fast and easy access. All in all, a very useful application that runs perfectly on the E71.

The next application, Pdf+, is a more powerful replacement for Acrobat Lite and easily handles large Acrobat files that Acrobat Lite will not open. Pdf+ also includes a PDFprinter application that allows you to create PDF files on your phone. I have tested this application with QuickOffice and it works fine with Spreadsheets and Presentations but not with Word documents. There seems to be a bug and when you try to create a PDF for a Word document, all you get is the first two lines of each page. I should mention that this is only a problem with QuickOffice 5.0, as it worked fine with earlier version of QuickOffice. There was an update to this software in May that was supposed to address this bug but it doesn’t seem to have fixed it. This is not, however, just an E71 issue. I have experienced this same behavior on my E90.

Lastly is JoikuSpot Lite, which is an absolutely brilliant application that turns your 3G mobile phone into a mobile wifi hotspot. It works by establishing an ad hoc connection between your PC and the E71. After this ad hoc connection is made, you can browse the Internet from your PC over your mobile phone's 3G connection. The Lite version only allows web connection but there is a premium version for 15.00€ that implements all of the standard connections, including VPN. I’ve only been testing this application on the E71 for a couple of days but so far it has worked flawlessly.

Well these are all the applications that I use and they all work perfectly on the E71, except for Pdf+, but this is not the result of a problem with the E71. The E71 also handles multitasking very well and is also very stable. In over two weeks of extensive testing, it has not crashed or locked up once. Nokia seems to have changed error handling on the E71. On occasion, an individual application will be closed by the system but the phone itself continues to operate fine. On prior S60 3rd edition devices I’ve used, individual applications did not seem to crash but the phone would crash or lock up. I believe that the error handling on the E71 is superior to earlier S60 3rd edition phones and is the reason the operating system is so stable.