A mere two years ago, who would have thought that Microsoft's Windows Mobile device platform would climb to a position where it would be compared with what the best of what the planet's most prolific handset maker - Nokia - has to offer from its Symbian OS based portfolio? With no further ado; the moment has arrived for us to pit the pinnacles of either platform against one another - and you might be surprised by the winner.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
The most visible difference between the two devices is their form factor. Perhaps best described as a hulking behemoth, the clamshell Exec has nothing on Nokia's comparably-sleek E61 candybar design - but then the Exec also offers a 20% larger, double-the resolution display and a thumbboard that's nearly twice the size of that of the E61. This allows for slightly increasing typing speeds, but the greatest benefit is the lowered concentration level required during typing. As for the screen, there's no denying the Exec can display more information than the E61, yet the latter still copes very well for the vast majority of tasks.
3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, memory expansion and USB; although the two devices match each other blow by blow in the connectivity department, the E61 wins by a slight margin courtesy of better reception, transfer speeds and voice call quality. Its lack of 3G video calling might bother a few souls, but the trade-off is well worth it. Far worse is the poor out-of-box synchronization support of the E61, which - in the name of fairness - has been improved through the launch of an Exchange ActiveSync application since our review, but still lags behind that of the excellent local and groupware support of the Exec.
Under the hood
Then there's the issue of daily use. For instance, while all aspects of the Nokia E61 can be controlled solely by one hand, the Exec for the most part requires two. This problem is magnified by the voice dialing setup of the Exec, which is speaker dependent and doesn't work with Bluetooth headsets - a polar opposite to that of the E61, and something which makes for a marring user experience for talkative users. Meanwhile, both handsets deserve praise for their ability to serve up and refine matches for contacts while users are still typing in the search box, with the Exec being ever-so-slightly snappier than the E61.
Other aspects worthy of comparison include e-mail clients, where the E61 is solidly beat by the Exec; the former's approach squeezes sender and subject onto one line sans wrapping, often rendering the overview illegible through chopping the subject line prematurely. Also, as much as this puzzles us, the Pocket Internet Explorer browser of the Exec does a far better job than that of the E61 at reformatting ordinary web pages for mobile viewing - while the E61 excels at traversing full-size web pages without reformatting them.
Lastly, on the note of productivity, the office suite of the E61 manages to appear a few hairs better than Microsoft's own Pocket Office; the E61 may not synchronize documents with a desktop as effortlessly, but has better so-called roundtrip capabilities than Microsoft's homegrown solution. In plain English, that means the E61 is slightly better at editing documents without losing more advanced formatting - but keep in mind that the larger display of the Exec will show more data on-screen.
When push comes to shove
There's no denying that both the Nokia E61 and O2 XDA Exec are superbly powerful and capable devices - but despite their similar feature sets, there is enough of a difference to set the two apart. Heavy users of data aspects are likely to see their needs better served by the Exec, while the E61 will cater better to those whose usage pattern leans more towards voice.
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