Nokia E71 (UMTS, Wi-Fi, A-GPS, Bluetooth, Nokia Maps, 3.2 MP) Smartphone

Having owned an E61 until today, I just bought this device from Amazon. The device gets great reviews on the 'net. The down sides are; the camera; small-ish keyboard and a slightly non-intuitive interface. Positives: great battery life (up to three days), small and light; GPS built-in; great range of little design features. Check out the reviews on the 'net, especially on YouTube, for more of a low-down.Be aware: if you buy it from a German Company, through Amazon, the keyboard configuration and all the documentation are, you guessed it... in German! But if you don't mind a keyboard with a 'Y' where the 'Z' should be, or downloading the ENGLISH documentation set from the web, then you'll be right at home!

This thing is probably the most amazing piece of mass produced consumer microhardware ever devised, with WiFi, GPS, HSDPA, GSM, and Bluetooth squeezed into something you can't even feel in your pocket. It is a beautifully crafted object. But beware: the hardware is a lot better than the software.I bought this to replace three devices: a smartphone, a Palm PDA, and a Nokia internet tablet. The E71 does a worse job in all three cases. This is not just because the interface is tedious.As a PDA, it's a bit of a joke - it doesn't come near my five-year-old Palm in any area, except that the keyboard is better. In fact so far as a PDA the E71 has proved downright dangerous. I made the mistake of changing the time zone because I went to Europe. Don't do this: the calendar helpfully adjusts all appointments in other time zones as if they were made in home time. This is just wrong - appointments are always entered in local time. I nearly missed a flight.The PC sync software is intrusive (it installs a completely unnecessary windows service, and a cloud of .exes and .dlls) and has no PDA functionality of its own - it relies on Outlook or Notes, or on the phone being connected, even to enter an appointment. Repeating appointments are poorly implemented. Palm got this right ten years ago.Web browsing is fast, but the screen is too small (which I knew), and scrolling by pressing a button turns out to be the worst way to browse. There is no page-by-page advance, even though there is a space bar. You will overshoot a lot. I don't like finger touch screens (yuck), but RIM's little wheel works better, at least when it's new. The RSS reader, which I use heavily, is part of the browser, and is primitive.The E71 has only average battery life, which is hardly surprising given the radio telecomms it packs in. It also has the habit of beeping mournfully at you for hours, complaining about a low battery, before switching itself off with no further warning. So it doesn't score highly as a phone, except that voice clarity is up to the usual Nokia standards.Apparently, no-one at Nokia has ever used a Blackberry. Email support is basic. It seems that if you are using MAPI, there is no way to automate the download of message bodies - only headers - so if you are on the plane and realise you have an urgent email, tough luck. Deleted headers do not disappear until you delete them from the source, so they clutter an already hard-to-read list. The limitations of the interface - which makes it next to impossible to select text - are most obvious here. The email app is the only thing that has so far caused an 'out of memory' error.I don't care about the camera and I didn't buy the E71 because of GPS. I'm guessing that if I want the battery to last more than two days, I should avoid using either.Nokia's engineers apparently don't pay their own phone bills. The E71 has an annoying habit of using HSDPA when there is WiFi available. I haven't yet been able to cure this addiction - there is no explicit set of rules you can set about what network to use when, although you can tell it not to poll email servers while roaming. Individual apps can be set to use a particular access point (whether it be WiFi or 3G) by default, if you have the patience to negotiate the deep menus, but this misses the point: the kind of connection you want to use depends on where you are, and what's available, not on what app you are using.Nokia have introduced interface Modes, on top of Profiles and Themes. They are a useless distraction needed partly because of the daft limit of 6 app icons on the home page - one of which is taken up by the Switch Mode icon. They do let you switch notifications on or off for work or private email, but actually it is easy to imagine doing this without using modes at all. What I expected was that they would help me manage roaming fees (a UK mode, a Home mode, a Cloud mode, a Roaming mode, say) but, well, they don't.The MS Office is welcome, and the PDF reader is fast, but the tiny screen is a serious limitation for anything but basic documents. One unexpectedly cool feature is the dictionary - but switching languages is tedious, and the dictionary is not integrated with any app where you might use words.The Symbian underpinnings seem stable enough. Startup is much quicker than Windows or Linux based devices. But the S60 interface desperately needs dialogue boxes to reduce the reams of scattered menus. And I'd love to know how to kill the damn Nokia startup tune.So, well done Nokia, the hardware company.

First thing I did, was connect to my computer, and update the software / firmware of the phone.I had this and an iPhone 3GS 32GB at the same time.This Nokia is -way- better as a phone, and so is its GPS / and battery / and is has buttons.Thats the jist of my review.So, I sold it a week after my iphone purchase, and I wish I had gotten to know my iPhone before I did.The E71 battery is like the biggest I've seen in the phone, yet the phone is not oversized at all.I bought it because I needed email at work, away from the laptop, and to that purpose, it did a great job! It has an MS Exchange Server icon, that allows you to set up your work mail with ease.When I was working in NY, I downloaded Nokia Maps, and it saved my life too. I only needed it for a temp period, and to that effect, the monthly fee did a great job. Have you seen the cost of the iPhone's GPS subscription??? Anyway, I'm not here to bash the iPhone, but the difference is big.The E71 looks so classy as a business phone, call quality is great, and the wifi finds twice the number of network of the other phone I said I'm not here to bash. :)I'd like to see the E71 less tall, and with a slightly bigger screen. Thats all.Oh, and it came unlocked. The iPhone had to be jail-broken. And what a mess that is.In short the E71 is the finest phone I've ever owned, with some of the best battery life I've yet seen. Ask anybody with an iPhone about their battery life.