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.

Review: Nokia E66

Well, I've just finished 2 weeks with the new E66 (thank you very much WOM World) and I have to say that I'm very impressed. My usual phone is an E90 Communicator and although I missed the QWERTY keyboard, everything else on the E66 was great. The first thing you notice when you pick up the E66 is how good it feels in your hand and how thin it is. The build quality is just excellent and it feels very solid with absolutely not creaks or rattles. Moving on to firmware and software, there have been some significant improvements. The three things that I liked best were the improvements to both the contacts and the calendar and the fact that Mail for Exchange comes pre-loaded. As Mail for Exchange is the first application I install on a new phone, this made transitioning to the E66 very fast. Basically 5 minutes after putting my SIM card into the E66 I was up and running. I have a business Exchange account (Exchange 2007) from mail2web.com and the new email wizard on the E66 worked perfectly. I simply entered the wizard, input my email address and password and my Mail for Exchange email profile was automatically setup. I also really liked the new calendar application. The displays show more information (some being very Outlook-like) and inputting new meetings was also easier. This was a big improvement from the old calendar. As impressed as I was with the email and calendar, I was even more impressed with the contacts application. First, the E66 introduces a new contacts function that allows you to enter the contact you're looking for directly from the active standby screen and then contacts that match appear on the screen. After 3 or 4 letters, you have the contact you want and can immediately dial the number. In addition to this predictive function, the contacts application itself has been greatly improved. Contact groups have been combined with the old Team Suites software to create a very easy and functional method of setting up conference calls. As I use my mobile phone as my primary business phone, conference calling is a very important feature for me and this works great on the E66. In addition to the above application improvements, I found the E66 firmware to be very stable. In the nearly 2 weeks that I used the phone, I did not experience a single crash and this was using all of the normal third party software that I use normally, including: Best Taskman Interactive Voice Call Master (IVCM) Best Profiles Y-Browser As the first three are tied to the IMEI number of my E90, I used trial versions. Best Taskman and Best profiles are great and mature products and simply work great. IVCM is an extremely powerful application that I use as the main telephone system for my small company. It intercepts calls, allows the user to select various options, such as leaving a message or transferring the call to me or one of my colleagues. It also allows you to set different profiles for nights and weekends. As I said, it's very powerful and even my E90 is pressed to handle everything. However, in the 7 days I ran IVCM on the E66 I had absolutely no problems. The faster CPU and, I think, optimized operating system, handled the load without any problems. In addition to the above third party applications, I also used the native SIP application that is standard in all E-series phones. This application has really come a long way in the two years since the first E-series devices were released and is now a very mature application. Again, the E66 connected to my wifi router and I made and received mVoIP calls routinely over the two weeks I used the phone. I normally use Truphone as my preferred mVoIP application, but the E66 is not yet supported. Therefore, I used my Vonage account, which I use because I can have a local number in Dallas, TX. I also use Sipgate to call Europe, as they have much better international rates. Sipgate worked flawlessly but I had a few problems with Vonage. I would routinely get a message when trying to place a call through Vonage saying that a connection could not be made. I believe this was a Vonage problem, especially since I never experienced this error using Sipgate, but I'm not certain. As for battery life, I have read a few early reviews of the E66 stating disappointing battery life and I have to say that the battery is the E66's weakest point. However, I was always able to make it through an entire day without having to charge the phone. Being in the US, I was not able to use 3G and therefore cannot comment on the affect that it would have on battery life. However, I was constantly connected to wifi, both in my office and at home in the evening. While I have never experimented to determine whether wifi or 3G uses more or less energy, I suspect that they are roughly comparable. Finally, I found that GPS (using Nokia Maps), the web, and auto screen rotation all worked flawlessly. In fact, friends were very impressed by both the auto screen rotation and the flash abilities of the S60 web browser. As I use my phone mainly as a business device, I did not extensively explore the multimedia applications. I did take a few photos and played back some TV shows that I recorded on my PC and transferred to my phone, both without problems. I also listened to some music and again had no problems. The business and email capabilities of E-series devices are the reason that they are my phones of choice and the E66 excels in these areas. The multimedia functions are not quite as good as my friend's N95 but you can certainly pass a two hour flight watching a movie or take an adequate photo of the kids. If you're looking for a new phone and don't need a QWERTY keyboard, I strongly recommend the E66. Nokia has built a real winner.