Nokia E 71 - First Look

Michael Gartenberg | August 01, 2008, 08:25 AM

When I got back from Seattle there were a few surprises waiting for me (I'll have to wait a bit to tell you about some of them) one of the cool ones was Nokia's new E71 Handset. Nokia's E series has been popular in various parts of the world and folks loved the big screen, good keyboard and of course the really big battery which meant talk time and data use were excellent. The E 71 is much smaller and slimmer with a wonderful screen and a great keyboard. It has a nice metal and verysolid feel to it that make it very comfortable to hold and carry. My first concern was battery life. After all, there's no magic in this. Small devices = small batteries which equals less use. So imagine my surprise that Nokia is using the same battery it used in the older and larger E devices. It's so odd opening the phone and seeing how much space is taking by the battery that one has to wonder, where is the phone mechanism? Magic indeed.
Specs are impressive at half VGA with GSM/GPRS/EDGE , 850MHz/1900MHz UMTS/HSDPA support, Wi-Fi 802.11 a,b,g, Bluetooth 2.0, and GPS. Whew. Lots of tech in here. Support POP/IMAP and Exchange Active sync make it easy to use this at work and at home. Speaking of which, there's a super cool feature that lets you set two different profiles, presumably one work and one for home. Theme changes totally to reflect. Would be great to see more choices in the future as to what gets switched with each profile but this is the start of something really cool. A device that finally reflects that people go back and forth between business and personal personas in the course of a day and especially when they're out and about. Web apps perform well but it's still frustrating not be able to cut and paste a URL from the web browser to the podcast application. Media functions for imaging and music are good and on par with other offerings from Nokia. Sadly, the E 71 does not support N-Gage just yet.
Call quality is excellent and with that big 1500mAh battery, it passes my battery of test of getting through a heavy day of talk, email and web with plenty to spare. My biggest issue is lack of app eco system around the E Series. No Tetris that I could find, forget the S60 series version of the Slingbox player etc… I'd love to see Nokia work with developers get some more cool functions on here. For now, it's a great phone and email device and for many users, that will be more than enough. The device also needs a carrier. Right now you can get these unlocked directly from Nokia at their stores in the US but this device really needs a carrier behind it to help Nokia tell the story to the mass market.
Bottom line? Excellent form factor, great battery life and performance for phone, email, and web with some nice secondary media features.