Initial Impressions Of The E71

This is one device I have been waiting to get my hands on from time news got out that such a phone exists! I originally planed to hold off till the time the E71 White came out but after a while I simply couldn’t resist and forgot about my enamour and gave the grey variant a go. Turns out, Grey isn’t so bad after all, it in fact is very good looking. Considering, the fact that I had a prejudice against it when the press photos came out, it still amazes me how I absolutely fell for it as soon as I had held it.

On opening the box, what amazed me was the size of the device, it is small. After reading reviews and opinions of people around the internet I expected the device to be small but the image I had in mind just didn’t measure up. In preparation for the E71, I played around with the E61i for a little while and compared to that the E71 is a true revelation in terms of size.

OUT OF BOX EXPERIENCE

Nokia is slowly but surely perfecting the art of giving consumers a good out of the box, first bootup experience. The settings wizard automatically configures operator settings, access points and so on based on the sim card inserted, a friendly ‘Welcome’ screen pops up to greet the user, while ‘Switch‘ is ready to get all his/her contacts, calender, messages across from the old phone even if it is a Series 40 Nokia.

The next part is what impressed me, since everyone and his dog these days seems to want Push Email, (quoting Steve here) Nokia decided to oblige. Once the above is done, Emoze, the push email solution launches with an option to use the free service or buy a licence. The service works well with Gmail and that means it works well for almost everyone. The application integrates itself well into the inbuilt messaging suite and with the dedicated Email key and allows you to define whether you want continuous push email or an update every ‘x’ minutes.

The reason I am happy with this small freeware’s addition is that in my opinion a large majority of the Eseries devices are bought by non corporates who do not have corporate email setups and those people rarely install new applications. Emoze for them will add a lot of value to the phone they just bought. With time Emoze will probably give way to Nokia’s homegrown Push Email solution and Eseries owners will probably get a free licence.

In total, without a computer, it took me a little less that 10 minutes to get all the stuff from my E90 across, get push email running and *forget* I ever owned a E90. If I were to rate the experience I’d be tempted to give it a 10/10.

IMPRESSIONS

As you may know, the E71 is the slimest QWERTY device in the market today and it takes a while to get over its size or rather lack of it. This is a plus in the E71’s favour, as the E61i’s successor it does drop from a 2.8″ screen to a much smaller 2.4″ but it is entirely worth it since the resolution remains the same and there is no loss in terms of actual screen real estate.

My next apprehension was the size of the keys, this is something I still have inspite of two days of usage. As time goes on, I am becoming faster and less error prone on the keyboard but I still am not fully convinced about my big thumbs being able to cope up. What is probably saving the E71 is the wonderful new predictive text input method that completes words for me, fixes spelling mistakes/typos and capitalises my ‘i’’s. The picture should become clearer in a few more days and at that point expect a complete comparison.

On the first day of using the E71 I had become convinced that my E90 was going to hit ebay to make way for the E71. It surprised me how a 470$ device was giving such competition to a 840$ monster. With a little more time my fondness for the E71 has grown but at the same time the importance of the E90 is being felt. Since moving from the Nseries powered N95 to the E90 the biggest thing I have missed is the Camera and with the E71 that gap widens quite a bit. Just today morning I needed to take some important images and the E71 failed me with its 3.2 megapixel camera and the bad camera software state. I no longer seemed to consider I had a camera on me, which wasn’t true when I still had the E90.

The E71 still might end up giving the E90 a run for its money, specially so when the targetted user doesn’t already own one. But one thing is for sure, this device will sell like hot cakes and will be bought by people who have nothing to do with the ‘E’ in Eseries. It is by far the most good looking Nokia ever. Period.

In the coming time, expect a detailed review and in case you want a specific aspect covered or have a question, just drop a line below.

thesymbianblog.com