We check out Nokia's slimmest smartphone to date in our in-depth Nokia E71 review. Is this business-focused phone's performance as good as its looks?
Review summary of the Nokia E71:
 |
|
Scoreboard » Features » Side-by-side » Gallery » |
 The Nokia E71 is a great slab-style QWERTY phone, better than almost any on the market. It has a slimmer, cooler design than the Motorola Q9h or the Samsung BlackJack 2, and it can handle almost all of the business tools that those Windows Mobile 6.1 phones use. It doesn't have all of the carrier amenities that we usually ignore anyway, like over-the-air music downloads and streaming video clips, and it could be more localized for U.S. users. Still, we had no problem setting up the phone for our Exchange ActiveSync business e-mail, and all of our favorite business features, like tethered modem support and Office Document handling, worked nicely. The biggest challenge this phone faces is competing with the ultra-low, carrier subsidized prices of its competitors, but if you want the top of the line phone in this form factor, the Nokia E71 is an easy choice. Release: July 2008. Price: $500.
Pros: Great design with a comfortable keyboard and a slim, slick case. Fast networking on AT&T's 3G network. Plenty of features, including GPS, Wi-Fi and Exchange support.
Cons: Setup could be confusing for the U.S. audience. Exchange AciveSync drains the battery significantly. Camera is lousy.
| Poor |
Mediocre |
73%
GOOD |
Very good |
Excellent |
|
|
|
Full Nokia E71 Review:
|
Design - Very good
The Nokia E71 is one of the most sleek and stylish Nokia phones we've used. As the slab-QWERTY competition, mostly the Samsung BlackJack 2 and the Motorola Q9, get larger and more bulky, the Nokia E71 is super-slim. It isn't light, but the weight gives it a dense, well-built feel. Since it's a high-end Nokia, it also gets a rich, 2.3-inch QVGA screen capable of great color depth (up to 16 million colors). The keyboard is also superlative. The full-QWERTY keys are soft and comfortable. They are slightly contoured for easy typing, with a great soft-touch finish. They may feel a bit small since they are packed together and not discrete keys, but they aren't as cramped as the unlocked Palm Centro we recently reviewed.
The Symbian S60 interface is struggling to keep up at this point. The rest of the phone is so new and modern looking that the buried folders and endless stream of tabbed menus in the S60 interface feels quite dated. Icons look great on the screen, but try finding the right application among the dozens of useless selections and you'll forget how great it looks. Thankfully, most of the apps that were hard to find quickly, like e-mail and the camera function, also got their own buttons or dedicated soft keys at the top level. Still, we can't wait for a significant update to the Symbian OS, and we're not just talking about touch.
Calling - Very good
Calls from the Nokia E71 sounded very good. Call quality was nice and clear. The microphone placement, aimed directly at our chin, meant that breathing noises were very audible, but we had no issues with static or noise. We used the phone on AT&T's HSDPA network and got full reception in suburban New Jersey, even while our Apple iPhone 3G only got a couple of bars.
For talk time, the phone managed a call that was nearly 5 hours long, which is on par with Nokia's estimates. Turning off the Wi-Fi and GPS definitely helped improve battery life, though we saw a drop again as soon as we synchronized the phone with our Exchange ActiveSync server. ActiveSync is a battery hog, as is HSDPA, so if you're out of range of AT&T's 3G network, you'll see an improvement in battery performance, as with most 3G phones.
For calling features, the Nokia E71 does a great job even where some previous Nokia phones have faltered. We synchronized our contacts with our Exchange server, and these loaded up nice and quick, except for our contact pictures, which didn't make the cut. We liked the live, while-you-type search of the contact list, even from the Today screen. Conference calling was easy, though the phone has two easy options for swapping between calls, but conferencing was a buried menu option. The Nokia E71 also has one of the best implementations of speaker-independent voice dialing we've seen on a Nokia phone. That isn't necessarily a compliment. It wasn't perfect, it missed our requests about a quarter of the time. But we've seen other Nokia phones that never got it right, so this was an improvement.
Messaging - Very good
Setting up e-mail on the Nokia E71 was painless, thanks to the Mail for Exchange app included with the Eseries devices. We synchronized with Exchange as well as our Gmail IMAP account, and both of these worked pretty well. In Exchange, we didn't have access to our subfolders, which presented us with a real problem as we use subfolders and rules to stay organized. But for standard Inbox stuff, the Nokia E71 did a fine job picking up Push messages quickly, even faster than our desktop found them.
Nokia doesn't include an IM client on the phone, which is even more disappointing on this device, with its comfy keyboard and fast networking. Since it's Symbian OS, there are probably loads of third-party apps available, but we like IM to be an out-of-box feature. Still, the phone has plenty of SMS and MMS options, and sending photos and multimedia to a variety of online services was easy, thanks to some very good preloaded options for Flickr, Nokia's Ovi and others.
Scheduling and productivity - Very good
The Nokia E71 has a full suite of business productivity options, plus a few features that are unique to this phone. For Office documents, the E71 uses QuickOffice, a neat, effective tool for creating and editing Word, Excel and even simple PowerPoint documents. E-mail attachments were no problem in our tests. For scheduling, we synchronized with Exchange ActiveSync. The calendar looked pretty good, and received all of the information we needed, but it wasn't very easy to use. Jumping to a specific date did not bring up the day's first event. We had to scroll through the hours to see where to go first. Also, we have yet to find a scheduler outside of Windows Mobile that allows us to invite attendees to a new appointment.
The phone doesn't get the same cool option for silencing rings that we liked on the Nokia E66. On that phone, if you get a call at a bad time, you simply flip the phone onto its face and it goes silent. The Nokia E71 didn't have this feature, but it did include a dedicated top-level menu button that could quickly switch between a work and a home profile. This changed the theme of the phone as well as a host of menu and sound options. It was useful, but would have been much improved as a hardware button, and not a menu item.
Web browsing - Very good
The Nokia mini-map Web browser is one of the best Web browsers on any mobile device. It is almost as good as the Apple iPhone Safari browser, though navigating pages is a bit easier on the iPhone. The Nokia E71 makes good use of Nokia's browser and AT&T's fast network. Pages loaded very quickly and looked sharp and accurate on the device's screen. The phone's mini-map gives you an overview of the page while you scroll, and scrolling was very fast and smooth using only the 4-way button. We especially like the "back" view that gives you thumbnails of recent pages to cycle back through. Our only complaint is that Nokia makes it unusually difficult to navigate to a page. It's easy if you have a bookmark you want to use, but entering a URL is a hidden option under a "Navigation Options" submenu.
Multimedia - Good
We're always puzzled when manufacturers who make excellent multimedia phones don't simply port the same apps to their business phones. We see this often with Sony Ericsson's Walkman phones as well as Nokia's Nseries devices. The media player on the Nokia E71 is good, and has plenty of advanced playback options. But it isn't as pretty or well-organized as the media experience on an Nseries device like the Nokia N78. Sure, there is an argument for segmenting the marketplace, but how about simply releasing a great phone? We're also puzzled why Nokia, or any manufacturer, would use a 2.5mm headphone jack on a high end phone, instead of a standard 3.5mm jack.
Camera - Mediocre
Images from the Nokia E71's 3-megapixel camera were especially disappointing. The camera features a built-in flash and auto focus, but neither of these features seemed to help much, even under the best conditions.
Our first sample was taken outside. It's a bit fuzzy, with plenty of visible noise, but the colors are nice and saturated (oversaturated?) and the photo is pleasant-looking, overall.
Flowers and road sign
Our second sample was a complete flop. The sky is completely blown out, leaving no details in the pine needles. The lower-right portion of the image is washed in a red tone, probably an effect of the bright sky.
Edge test
Our final sample was even more vexing. We took the picture of the Jelly Belly beans in our studio light box, but the exposure is completely off. Even worse, the noise is quite distracting and only the boldest of colors seems to seep through the haze. The lens also appears prone to vignetting, proucing the dark shadows that lurk in the corners of this image.
Jelly Belly
Laptop sidekick - Very good
The Nokia E71 makes a fine laptop sidekick. It uses microUSB to charge and tether with a laptop, and we appreciate Nokia's embrace of this standardized port. The phone also surfs AT&T's fastest network, so tethered modem results were very good. We saw data speeds come close to 1Mbps, which is very fast for a cell phone, though not the fastest we've seen. Our favorite option is the Internet Sharing-type of app that some Windows Mobile phones, like the Palm Treo 800w, include, which lets you click a single button on the phone and simply plug it in for full Internet access.
Odds and ends
There are a few complaints we have about Nokia's high-end import phones in general. First of all, they simply aren't localized to U.S. networks. Nokia has done a better job with their automatic setup tools, but using the Nokia E71, we were continually asked to choose one of AT&T's numerous data networks. It was confusing and probably unnecessary. The phone also includes loads of apps, some of which are useless to American audiences. The Music Store, for instance, doesn't work here, nor does Push-to-Talk functionality. Overall, the phone often made us feel as if we needed the help of a network administrator, which may be fine for some large corporate business users, but there should be easier, more automated options.
Our second complaint is that an unlocked keyboard seems to be a major concern for Nokia. The Nokia E71, like many other Nokia devices we've used, locks its keyboard and blacks out the screen, and we would have liked a wider time range for setting this locking interval. Also, unlocking the phone requires typing a couple keys, but if you forget which keys to type, the phone doesn't always wake up to offer a hint. We'd understand this more on a sensitive touchscreen phone, but the Nokia E71 seems to be stiff enough to handle some accidental jostling.
Price and availability
The Nokia E71 is available in Nokia flagships stores and online, unlocked, for $500.
|
|
|
|
|
Archive