Nokia E71 review

Nokia has been trying for several years to make a phone with a full Qwerty keyboard on it, and hasn’t had much luck. While its Communicator smartphones have a loyal following, they are big, heavy and expensive, making them unsuitable for the everyday phone users that love the BlackBerry.

Mainstream phones like the Nokia 6822, which had half the keyboard either side of the screen were weird and largely unpopular with users. Eventually, Nokia got on the right track with the E61, which takes inspiration from the BlackBerry size, shape and layout that has proved popular with both business and consumer users.

The trouble was, the E61 was slow and had a poor keyboard. It’s successor, the E61i addressed the keyboard issues to a degree and added a camera, but failed to do anything about the performance problems.

Now, in its third incarnation as the E71, Nokia looks like it might have cracked it. The phone is now smaller than its predecessors, and is in fact almost same size as an iPhone as well as 1.3cm narrower than the E61i.

The E71 measures in at 114mm tall, 57mm wide and 10mm thick, against the iPhone’s dimensions of 115mm tall, 61mm wide and 11mm thick. The E71 weighs in at 127g against 135g for the iPhone. The thing to remember is that the E71 is designed with email in mind and like its predecessors it has a full Qwerty hardware keyboard.

This has been redesigned again from the E61i and despite the 71 being narrower; the keyboard is a huge improvement and is easier to type on. The keys are raised higher and depress further, giving you a more comfortable and more reassuring feel that a key has been pressed fully.

Even with big hands, the keys are easy to use and typing accuracy is high. Even dialling phone numbers is easy, with the numeric keypad mapped to a block of 12 keys just to the left of centre to suit thumb dialling by a right-handed user.

You’ll also find many of the features seen on Nokia’s N95 and N73, including a built-in GPS unit, a 3.2 megapixelcamera on the back (no Carl Zeiss lens but it takes excellent pictures nonetheless) and a very basic camera on the front for video calling.

The E71 runs Nokia’s S60 Symbian operating system, which is a tried and tested mobile phone operating system. Its not infallible, but its more reliable than most of its competitors. It also benefits from the faster processor found in the E71, allowing you to navigate through menus and switch applications quickly and smoothly.

There’s no shortage of data connectivity options on the E71, with built-in Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.0, 3.6Mbit/sec HSDPA, dual-band 3G and quad-band GSM support.

Of course, heavy use of any of these will take its toll on battery life. Nokia quotes 10.5 hours talk time and 408 hours standby time. In our experience, we found that talk time was nearer 6.5 hours, and standby time nearer to 200 hours with no data access. Moderate 3G data use soon took this down to 3-4 days, but still a vast improvement on most other smartphones in the same bracket.

Software wise, the E71 has all the basics covered straight out of the box. There’s a web browser, email client, some games pre-installed and support for push email. Thankfully there is no shortage of Symbian applications out there and the number is growing rapidly. Popular apps include IM clients for Skype and Windows Live Messenger, a tool for live video streaming to the web from the phone’s camera and a range of file viewers.

Email support is excellent, with an email client that handles the full range of email platforms including POP3, IMAP and even BlackBerry Push Email via an add-on. Multiple accounts are not a problem, and it will happily check email in the background, reporting on the home screen whether there are new messages to be read as well as how many.

The browser is one of the stronger points of S60. It handles WAP sites and can display a web page exactly as you would see it on a desktop computer, zooming in on the bit you actually want to read – just like an iPhone. The difference is that, with no touch screen display, you need to use the thumb controller to position a box over the area you want to view and click select.

The same applies for selecting items and links, or moving the cursor into a text box. This is the one area where a touch display seems to always do better, but the E71's browser does as good a job as can be expected otherwise. It can be a little sluggish, especially when accessing full web pages, but not to the point that it becomes unusable.

Add to all this a decent music and video player and all the usual Nokia refinements and easy to use layout, and not only do you have a solid business smartphone, but you have a really good consumer phone.

If you are not fully embedded into iTunes and like using a proper keyboard, then the E71 is a serious iPhone alternative, as well as being a respectable and high-end business device.