26 comments

• 

  Zylam Marex

  12 months ago

  Nice, so its a pretty decent upgrade from the E61i, even though its got a smaller screen, yea i was also wondering about the icons? why did nokia not use their usual ones?
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  kozjegyzo

  12 months ago

  Thanks Abul! Great review! I'm glad you got over the hangover to write it :D
  By the sound of it you where impressed by the device. What you write is what I was pondering about when I first saw the E71. It looks great but the screen and the keyboard size worries me. I have big hands and pushing small buttons is hard. I thought Nokia would stay with the screen size of the E61, because the phone is built with e-mail and the web in mind. Browsing with such a small screen can be strenuous. I'm glad that the processing power and the ram went up significantly, one needs them since there are so many apps now days that run constantly in the background, making our lives easier, but straining the device.
  I still haven't made up my mind over getting one of these devices or switching over to a win-mo device with a nice big touchscreen... it's so tempting, but I'm not much of a win fan...
  The HTC Diamond and the upcoming HTC Touch Pro are the candidates in my eyes. I wish that Nokia would finally bring out their touch interface. That would make even small screen browsing so much easier and the overall user experience better, I wouldn't even think about switching.
  
  Sadly though that is far in the future, at least a year I presume, and I don't know if I can wait that long, and by then Android will be ready for commercial use. Hate to say, but Nokia has to come out with some great handsets to compete against HTC and a whole lot of other competitors that will run Android (which will level the playing field software-wise).
  
  Sorry for going off topic... I'm waiting for the rest of the critical review especially the lacks of the E71, because the pros are plain to see :D
  
  THX again Abul
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• 

  Abul

  12 months ago

  Agree the HTC Touch Pro is a great design with the keyboard and large screen, the Diamond on the other hand was shocking when I played with it. The Diamond is one of those devices that look great and one would want to get a piece of, but in actual real life situation it let's you down.
  My impressions of it are very poor.
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• 

  kozjegyzo

  12 months ago

  I see so Diamond = iPhone ;)
  Thanks for sharing that with us.
  You guys should have a blog this professional for win-mo devices too :D
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  Abul

  12 months ago

  I wouldn't say the Diamond = the iPhone, more like the Diamond tried to be the iPhone and failed epically in my eyes.
  Touchflo was pretty lame, the device was confusing, and it got hot pretty quick. I wasn't impressed with the feedback and responsiveness of it, something the iPhone does with ease.
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  kozjegyzo

  12 months ago

  I was referring to the shiny and flashy but a disappointment part. Touchflo has a great way to go, it's nothing like the iPhone ui, I hope they will work on it.
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• 

  Wouter

  12 months ago

  Thanks! I'm eagerly following review info an the E71 as I'm very interested in buying one. I currently own the E51 which is very similar. One thing that I know not a lot about and doesn't seem to have a lot of focus is the (for me) change from vertical layout of the screen to horizontal. How do applications cope? And themes (although less important)? I use Handy Calendar eg, how would that work on a horizontal layout? And what about SkyeQuikey, T9Nav, etc? How would they deal with the qwerty keyboard vs numeric?
  
  Would be great if you (or anyone else with experience) could focus on this a bit more.
  Keep up the great work!
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  kozjegyzo

  12 months ago

  Thanks Wouter for bringing these questions up, I totally forgot to ask them as I went into my bable about other stuff. I have an E51 too and these questions are very relevant.
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• 

  Abul

  12 months ago

  The vertical screen orientation doesn't change much, everything seems to fit in widescreen, but one thing I did notice is the decreased number of icons on the homescreen in comparison to the E61i's. The E71 has the same number as the N series devices, and that's due to the smaller screen size.
  All in all moving to widescreen is the same concept when moving from a 4:3 tv screen to 16:9, you get more of a wider view, applications are designed to optimize this and there is no problems.
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• 

  Zylam Marex

  12 months ago

  but the Diamond has VGA screen.....i'm so bored of QVGA you can see the ridges around icons and stuff....but i'm hearing alot that the Diamond is really slow.....man HTC had that video driver problem with the TYTN2 and now this with the next gen......
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  Abul

  12 months ago

  But the screen is too small to make use of that VGA resolution. Watching a 1080P movie on a 32" screen is almost non noticeable, this goes the same way with VGA and QVGA.
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  Zylam Marex

  12 months ago

  ok you have a point but i'm talking about upgrades we've had QVGA for so long....ok nokia don have to go straight to VGA but they could have at least gone up a step to half VGA screens...... 2.8 screen with QVGA is not really pretty, the icons look abit out of focus....the regular N95 menu looks shaper than the N95 8GB's but it works i have to agree that its not a total loss.....but they could have done something to the N96....
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  Abul

  12 months ago

  If VGA is desired and done well we'll need it done on a bigger screen, minimum 3". If anything maybe on the Nokia Touch device, it should have a nice big screen.
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• 

  Merlin

  12 months ago

  I dropped my shiny new E71 too (actually the holster fell off the belt clip by itself, and landed on the concrete :-( ). Now it got small dents on the bottom right mettalic part and release button. Only God knows how pissed off I feel every time I look at it.... :-(
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• 

  Abul

  12 months ago

  The worst thing is the scratches are very noticeable on the shiny metal surface, stands out like a sore thumb!
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• 

  bitflung

  12 months ago

  "push e-mail on updating every 30 mins via 3G"
  
  please PLEASE please!!!! stop using this term incorrectly. Nokia users (i use an N95): Push email does NOT GET UPDATED EVERY _X_ MINUTES. This is like saying you're going to poll for incoming SMS every 30 minutes - or that "maybe those windmills will cool you off" - it just doesn't work this way!
  
  countless times in recent months i've seen this misnomer. and i keep trying to correct it. why? because i want REAL PUSH EMAIL. if everyone accepts that we've got it already "by polling every 30 minutes" then the definition of the problem becomes grey and cloudy.
  
  Look at the US market for bluetooth. Verizon and Microsoft both played their role in destroying the ubiquitous Personal Area Network that is Bluetooth. sure sure, buy a nokia and bluetooth does what it's meant to. but my co-workers and even my boss have no idea that verizon has crippled their precious strangled devices. no one in my office, beyond me, can use their phones as generic, open, connected devices.
  
  why? because they have accepted that Bluetooth==handsfree. they've accepted it as much as every windows user has accepted that windows==performance (also a lie) or that mac==graphics (another lie).
  
  please PLEASE for the sake of my sanity, don't propagate this sort of mis-use of terms into the realm of nokia. you'll end up redefining the term altogether -- just as the media did when they used Hacker instead of Cracker - now the term hacker is forever clouded by the stupidity the masses, and it's our fault for not providing them all with the proper terms when the mis-use was young enough to be fixed. "great hack"! can now be followed by a whispering, "is that legal"? it's a shame.
  
  polling for email every 30 minutes? thats called any of these: 'Email', 'Pull Email', 'Polled Email', or 'Timed Retrieval of Email'. PUSH gets PUSHED to your device. if this were an alarm clock, you would be pretty ticked off if i sold you a clock that you could look at every 30 minutes and, if it reads 9:30am or later lets you press a button to make it beep. no no no, you'd want the alarm to PUSH the beep at you, so you can ignore it until it beeps. having the clock automatically check it's time every 30 minutes to push the button for you? that's half-assed. it's not a REAL alarm clock. it's a misnomer to call it such. perhaps it's useful, or at least more so than the clock that requires user intervention at all times, but it's still not right -- and the RIGHT thing exists, it's real, it can be had, IT EVEN HAS A NAME.
  
  *sigh*
  thats the end of my rant. sorry for being so long winded. if you actually read this whole thing you must be thinking i'm nuts. i'm just fed up. i'm tired of 'polling' email being called push. i'm tired of technology failing to take root because people forget they want it.
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• 

  Abul

  12 months ago

  Indeed it's not really push e-mail, but I should also mention I have Seven also set-up, which is Real-Time Push E-mail.
  Don't mind the rant, we all have our moments :P
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• 

  Zach

  12 months ago

  lol We love a good rant! :)
  
  Something to note - if you have IMAP accounts set up with polling times of
  30 minutes or less, S60 supports IMAP idle meaning that new email headers
  will be pushed as they arrive. The Nokia mail app will keep the data
  connection alive and while this is not traditional push email (body must
  still be retrieved manually), it is the source of some of the "push"
  confusion.
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• 

  Eric

  12 months ago

  Is there any documentation around for the newer VPN client?
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• 

  Abul

  12 months ago

  There is some info in the E71's User Guide http://nds1.nokia.com/files/support/apac/phones...
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• 

  Nick P

  12 months ago

  Be very wary if you are moving from an e61i to the e71 and had Blackberry BIS or BES on the E61i... If you roam outside your home country (or even if you are bandwidth capped in your home country), the data required to support the quasi-push/pull email in the e71i is a lot more inefficient than with Blackberry.
  
  We had a user with the Mail for Exchange on another Nokia device rack up $300 in data roaming charges just for 20 emails each a day over 30 days. The Mail for Exchange software polls the server like crazy, changing the interval helps but then it's nowhere no real time.
  
  No carriers I've seen are doing an "all you can eat" email data charges service for local or roaming with Mail for Exchange. For those who didn't know.. most carriers had a flat rate Blackberry service fee for local data charges (no cap on BB email usage) and also had add on packages to make international data roaming for BB email flat rate.
  
  For our company we love the e71, but without a way to have predictable email data charges we are having to stick to the e61i's and look at Blackberry devices.
  
  Poor move by Nokia here... There are going to be a LOT of IT departments and finance people who are going to have a fit when their roaming users get their first bills for data usage.
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  Abul

  12 months ago

  Thanks for pointing this out, sounds like a big negative especially as this is an E Series!
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  Zach

  12 months ago

  That's a huge negative indeed! In certain areas it might not be a
  problem - when I went to London for example I picked up a prepaid card
  and paid £1/day for unlimited data so it wouldn't be a problem. Deals
  like that are rare though and most people don't want to deal with
  hunting down a prepaid SIM so they just roam internationally. That's
  going to cause some problems indeed!
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  kozjegyzo

  11 months ago

  Could Seven be the answer for this problem also?
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  CALOCHO

  11 months ago

  Does the e 71 edit ms office files?.....
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  Abul

  11 months ago

  It's a premium function but yes you can with quickoffice.
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