A few months ago, the fine people at WOMWorld lent me a Nokia E71 for review. I’ve been putting off publishing any sort of remarks because my mom always said “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all.” But, lately, they’ve been insistent. So, here we go.
First the good.
The phone is beautiful. It feels nice in the hand. The included case is attractive, easy to get the phone out of, and provides great protection. The keyboard, though a bit tight at first, is easy to get to. Outside of the case, the phone feels nice though it could do well to have a bit more grip. A silicone case should help. The screen is vibrant and has plenty of resolution. Buttons are well placed and mostly intuitive.
As far as the HARDWARE goes, this phone deserves top ratings. It’s the software that I have big issues with.
Getting the phone setup in the beginning is difficult. There are lots of settings and they are spread out in many non-intuitive locations.
The Active Today screen that provides updates on the status of your email, text messages, and mobile service is cumbersome at best. The directional pad did not operate as expected and I found myself guessing incorrectly regarding what various buttons and menu choices would do.
The way data connections work are plain silly. Ideally, the phone would understand that, in most cases, a WiFi connection is better than a GPRS/EDGE connection. It should at least give me the option of switching seamlessly between the two. Instead, most applications require you to set a connections and your choice is either a WiFi connection or a GPRS connection. Even switching to another WiFi connection requires work. An application called PsilocConnect (which costs extra) is supposed to help with this. You choose the PsilocConnect connection. It then either chooses any available WiFi connection or a GPRS connection when WiFi is unavailable. This makes sense and works pretty well except when you have an application that doesn’t allow you to choose the PsilocConnection. Then the fight with each other and the only real loser is the user.
Messaging is the killer app on Mobile and the Nokia E71 software fails in every possible way.
It supports PUSH email, which is great. But the implementation is limited. The phone will either poll at intervals and download the entire message when it does, or it will support PUSH but only download the headers and fail to reconnect if the data connection is interrupted. I could be wrong here. The settings screen for setting up this part of email was very difficult to understand and the manual shed no additional light. If I over looked something, then it certainly wasn’t because I didn’t try. Using 3rd party email applications didn’t help either. BlueWhaleMail was the closest, but still not quite right. Emoze was buggy. Nokia’s Email Service also didn’t function reliably and seems to have a one email account limitation.
The Nokia also didn’t seem to come with any IM applications. No gTalk, AIM, MSN,Yahoo, Jabber, nothing. There are some 3rd party options available here as well. I tried a few with limited success. None seemed to be really well designed, intuitive, or easy to use. Additionally, most of them required additional purchase.
Even the Nokia PC Suite was buggy. I couldn’t import my Yahoo Address book export no matter how hard I tried. In many cases the PC Suite had trouble realizing the phone was connected. It crashed fairly regularly. The built in messaging applications were very slow if they worked at all.
Even simple things like lighting up and sounding some kind of alert when a Bluetooth device attempts to connect were not implemented. I attempted to use a Bluetooth GPS device but the phone didn’t seem to accept that. It’s own built in GPS application never fully indicated location.
In conclusion, the phone hardware seems outstanding and well built. It’s the Symbian OS that needs to catch up with the iPhones and Blackberrys of the world. When you consider the fact that these phones are not really being subsidized by any US carrier, this means that customers are expected to pay full price as well. This just isn’t going to happen with so many other options available with software that actually works as expected.