August 09th 2008 Posted in
Nokia Introduction:
Nokia’s new E71 is the company’s 3rd try at the popular “BlackBerry” form factor of business smartphones. The original Nokia E61/E62 handsets had the right basic shape, but were thicker and overall bulkier than those from the competition at the time. The E61i improved on that, but still wasn’t quite capable of going toe to toe with the best on offer from the likes of HTC and RIM. But with the E71, Nokia has shown that it can be a leader in this space. The E71 has a great spec sheet, a slim and solid body, and the powerful S60/Symbian system lurking inside. We give it a thorough thrashing to see how it holds up.
Physical Aspects:
The E71 is a very solidly built smartphone. Its body is largely made up of strong metal panels, and its solid 129g (4.5oz) weight inspires a lot of confidence, even if it is a fair bit heavier than some competing models. In spite of its weight, though, the E71 is very compact. It measures only 115mm x 57mm x 11mm (4.5″ x 2.2″ x .4″) in size. That’s a hair longer, but a few millimeters narrower and 1mm thinner than Samsung’s svelte BlackJack II.
The front of the E71 consists of two main features, the 2.4″ QVGA resolution display and the QWERTY keyboard and associated navigation buttons. The display is a bit small for my liking, but if the display had been any larger then the entire device would have grown in size and E71 would lose some of its pocketability. The display is reasonably bright and colorful, and the automatic backlight adjustment setting manages the screen’s battery drain pretty nicely.
The full QWERTY keyboard on the E71 is pretty good, though I prefer the spaced out keys on the BlackJack II for the confidence they inspire. Admittedly, the E71’s keyboard is much better looking due to the fact that the keys fit snugly together and, instead of spacing, rely on a domed shape to guide fingertips. The keyboard is somewhat cramped, but I have managed to adjust to it pretty well in spite of having large hands. Most women would probably find the keyboard spot on. The control and shortcut cluster above the keyboard is also a bit cramped, but they do provide the user with a lot of flexibility. The chrome d-pad controller is good enough for general use, and the softkeys and call keys are wide, even if they are quite narrow. The dedicated home, calendar, contacts, and mail buttons are very handy, and can be reprogrammed for both short presses and long presses, which gives the user a lot of customization options.
There are few other controls on the E71. On the left edge you’ll find the covered microSD slot and micro-USB port (data only, not power), and on the right edge you’ll see the two volume buttons that straddle the voice dial button (activated with a long press). There is no dedicated shutter button on the E71, in spite of the fact that it sports an autofocus 3.2 megapixel camera. I like the spring loaded back cover release buttons that are located on the bottom of each side of the phone. They require a bit of strength to depress, but they make for a very solid rear cover fit.
A 2.5mm headset jack sits above the volume controls, and the camera lens and flash can be found around back. The only other features of note on the E71 are the mini Nokia power port on the bottom of the phone and the red power button and speaker grille on the top. The power button looks nice, but is a bit hard to use, especially when compared with the similarly red button on the E66.
Overall we are very impressed by the design of the Nokia E71. That missing camera button and the glossy metal finish of the phone, which makes an oily looking mess of the most innocent of fingerprints, are the only real downsides to the E71’s otherwise fine physical design. The E71 comes with a nice carrying case (and matching lanyard) that will help keep the finish clean, though.
Core Functions:
While there have been some reports of people having trouble with the Nokia E71’s reception abilities, I have found the phone to be quite solid overall when it comes to calling tasks. It is true that the signal indicator on the E71 often suggests that there is little to no signal available, but in spite of that the phone seems to perform just fine - and that is the true test. Battery life on this quad-band GSM, dual-band UMTS smartphone is rated at 10.5 hours of talk time (GSM) or 17 days of standby time. Our tests on AT&T’s GSM network came in at just over 8.5 hours of talk time. There are three different UMTS configurations for the E71: 900/2100MHz for Europe, 850/1900MHz for North America, and an 850/2100MHz version for some other parts of the world, such as Australia. Calls were crystal clear, among the very best we have tested, and the speakerphone was also a great performer at relatively short distances.
The contacts management system on the E71 has been improved over that of older systems thanks to the addition of home screen contact searching. Basically you just start typing out the first or last name of a contact on the QWERTY keyboard and a small list appears on the screen displaying all the possible matches. It works very well indeed. The contact manager itself stores every type of data for a contact that you can imagine - even birthday, assistant phone number, and spouse’s name.
The Nokia E71 has a very complete profiles system with one exception: it lacks timed profiles for some reason. Existing profiles can be customized, and new profiles can be created as desired. Separate voice and video call tones can be set, vibration can be enabled or disabled, and separate message and email tones can be set, too. The “breathing” light around the d-pad can be enabled to show that the phone is on, and the profiles can also restrict calls based on contact groups. The E71 profiles can also be configured to take advantage of the phone’s text to speech system to announce callers verbally.
The Nokia E71 smartphone supports both speed dialing and voice dialing, but we had a few problems with the later. Speed dials are easily configured in the contacts manager and can be accessed by long pressing the associated number key on the keypad. No problems there. Voice dialing, on the other hand, just didn’t work for us. When used both with and without a Bluetooth headset, the speaker independent voice dialing application routinely caused the phone to reset itself or just found no match. Obviously this is a bug in the firmware, but since Nokia has long had trouble with its speaker independent voice dialing app, it isn’t safe to assume that a future firmware update will ensure a robust experience.
First and foremost, the E71 is a phone designed for messaging. This is, sadly, where it comes up a bit short. While the SMS and MMS support in the phone is quite good, and the regular email support for IMAP and POP accounts is also solid, the device drops the ball when it comes to business class email. As an Eseries phone, business is what the E71 is supposed to be all about. First up, BlackBerry support is missing from the E71 - Nokia has confirmed that the BlackBerry client for S60 is not compatible with the E71. Secondly, the Microsoft Exchange support is less than stellar. The free Nokia Mail for Exchange client does a fine job of synchronizing the phone with push email, contacts, tasks, and calendar appointments, but does not support email subfolders. If you have your email filtered into folders by your Exchange server, you won’t be able to access them. DataViz makes an Exchange client called RoadSync that supports folders, but the application is no less unstable and problem prone than when I last tested it a year and a half ago.
The E71 does adequately deal with basic data connectivity needs, though. The E71’s UMTS/HSDPA 3G data connectivity generally managed somewhere in the neighborhood of 900Kbps on AT&T’s network. EDGE also data worked perfectly, and the improved connection management system on the E71 makes switching between WiFi and EDGE/UMTS connectivity a bit easier than with prior devices. Bluetooth wireless support is there, including A2DP stereo functionality. While it can’t charge via its micro-USB connector, the E71 can be easily connected to a personal computer with the included micro-USB to USB cable.
Multimedia / Applications:
In spite of its obvious business intent, the Nokia E71 has a wide variety of multimedia capabilities. The most surprising of which would be its 3.2 megapixel camera, which offers both an LED flash as well as autofocus. It is quite impressive that Nokia was able to fit such a camera into the 11mm thin E71, but the camera turns out to have some real issues that keep the E71 from being a real photography tool. For starters, there is no dedicated camera shutter button, though a shortcut key could be assigned to starting the camera. The lack of a proper shutter button is an issue when it comes to the autofocus system. Since a normal shutter button on an AF cameraphone would activate the focusing when pressed half way and take the photo when pressed fully, Nokia had to come up another solution.
What they did is require users to press the T/2 key on the keyboard to activate the autofocus, and then press the d-pad’s center select button to take the photo. If you just press the d-pad’s button, the camera takes the photo without focusing at all. For a full week we believed the autofocus on the E71 to be broken because there was no setting that mentioned AF, and it was obviously not being used. But the camera has other troubles. It takes particularly poor photos when the lighting is anything but bright, and the color balance of the photos in anything but sunlight always seems off. This means that the camera is of little use in indoor situations as a general rule, which is a shame.
The music player on the E71 thankfully works better than the camera. It organizes music well, and the E71’s A2DP Bluetooth supports lets music be enjoyed without the normal tangle of wires. This is good because, while the E71 ships with a stereo headset, it uses 2.5mm jack instead of a normal 3.5mm jack like most music devices. The in-box CD includes Nokia’s music manager application for synchronizing music, but the truth is that the E71 can be used with any MTP compatible music app, including Winamp and Windows Media Player (though album art did not transfer when we used WMP). Synchronization over the USB connection is quite speedy, and the music player itself offers features such as an equalizer, balance control, and stereo widening in addition to on-phone playlist creation.
Standard equipment on any Nokia S60 based smartphone is the S60 web browser. This is the browser that first proved that mobile devices could handle websites meant for desktop computers. It does a wonderful job of rendering complex websites on the E71’s QVGA resolution display, and it incorporates a number of nice usability features like the visual back/forward page viewer and the page mini-map, a feature we are seeing on a lot of other browsers these days. Using the d-pad to maneuver the mouse pointer around a large page can be somewhat of a pain, but in general the browser lets users get to real websites from a smartphone.
Another major application that comes pre-loaded on the E71 is version 2.0 of the Nokia Maps navigation software. Maps 2.0 makes use of the phone’s A-GPS support and provides turn by turn navigation (if purchased, 7 day trial offered) and point of interest lookup. The 2.0 app is easier to use than the original version, but I still find it a bit cumbersome overall. I have to admit that its search function seems to do a very nice job of finding local stores and ATMs and such, though. It’s a very handy feature.
There are plenty of other applications included on the E71 as well. The calendar and tasks manager are full featured and can be synchronized with a personal computer or over the air with a remote server (just like email and contacts). The included QuickOffice app lets user view, create, and edit Word, Excel, and Powerpoint compatible documents. There is a handy multi-language dictionary on-board, and the normal selection of apps like a calculator, convertor, zip file manager, and PDF viewer. No games are pre-loaded on the E71, but a few free ones are available from the Download! application.
While not really a smartphone application per se, I tested out the E71 with Nokia’s Files on Ovi service. Files on Ovi places a client on your desktop computer and provides you with remote access to the files on the computer from most any phone. I used it to read and email a PDF on my PC from the E71. The service also offers online storage for those files that need to be accessible even when the desktop PC is offline.
The Nokia E71 offers users roughly 71MB of free application RAM and about 110MB of built-in storage space. Its microSD memory card slot supports cards as large as 8GB in capacity.
User Interface:
Nokia’s S60 smartphone platform, which runs on the Symbian OS, has been around for many years (it’s been 6 years since I reviewed the 7650, the first S60 device). The platform is stable, feature rich, and well supported by developers. Nokia has been busy over the years adding features and tweaking the user interface. But as new features have been added to phones, keeping the UI organized has become more and more of an issue. While S60 has all of the required visual appeal, it is getting a bit unwieldy at times on more feature-rich phones.
But Nokia has been trying to make things more intuitive for users. Swapping out the old style S60 menu key, which looked something like a yin/yang symbol, for the new home button is a start. The way the button works has changed, too. From the standby screen, pressing the home key will take you to the main menu. Pressing it from anywhere apart from the standby screen takes you back to the standby screen, which is a change from the old behavior. This is a smart move.
Nokia’s Active Standby feature also aims to organize things a bit for users, minimizing their reliance on the often crowded main menu, with all of its folders and dozens of apps. Active standby lets users pick commonly used apps and have them accessible from the standby screen as well as choose information that should be displayed below the app icons, including mail, calendar, and music data. That’s been around for a while, but what is new is the icon to the right of the 5 user configurable app icons. Now users can configure two different modes for their smartphone. Each mode can have its own theme and Active Standby configuration, and switching modes takes only a couple of seconds. It’s a great new feature. Users can easily have separate work and play modes defined. Work might place an emphasis on email and appointments, while play might include app icons for music, photos, the camera, and web browsing. It’s a great addition to S60.
Another feature of the E71 that I really like is the Active Notes app. This app lets you write a note and then attach it to a contact. Once attached, any call to or from that contact will cause the note to pop up on the screen. This makes it great for reminders (”Don’t forget to ask mom about dad’s surprise party”) and the notes can even include media objects like sounds or videos. Once a call to the linked contact has been established, the QWERTY keyboard can be used to edit or otherwise add to the note during the call. It’s a very handy feature.
Just as handy is the new auto-correct function of the T9 predictive text input system. When enabled, the E71 will automatically correct typos without any intervention required by the user. The E71’s display will alert the typist to the presumed fault, but will automatically fix the problem unless the user deliberately selects the questioned word from the T9 word list. Something like this should be standard on all QWERTY smartphones.
The Nokia E71 might not come with the widest assortment of themes, and it might lack the fancy screen transition effects of devices that run S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2, such as the Nokia N78, but once users get familiar with the UI, they will find that it offers a lot of good functionality for business users.
CAMERA SAMPLES OF THE Nokia? E71:
