Great article Andrew. Very useful. However, I think it needs some form of table/synopsis to compare the devices - I found it difficult to read it due to the number of pages(and because there is a lot to follow). Maybe I might create one later today. Keep up the good work. kind rgds Ajit

Why is there no Blackberry in this test?

And since this is The Register, why don't you mention SSH capabilities? E-mail is all very well for the drones, but real men need tty.

John

If you are going to close the current application and return to the standby screen, you can just use the call end key. Only if you want to leave the application running, you have to use two keystrokes (push the application menu key twice) to return to the home screen.

You don't have to push the power button to lock the keys. An adaptation of the classic "menu -> asterisk" shortcut can be still used in the standby screen: push the left soft key and immediately push the "chr" key (the white "up" triangle on the blue background) in the lower left corner of the keyboard.

Copying and pasting text uses classic two-handed shotcuts: select text by holding down the shift-key and moving the cursor. Ctrl-c copies, ctrl-x cuts and ctrl-v pastes text. They work in any large text editor field. And you can underline text with ctrl-u, italicize text with ctrl-i and bold text with ctrl-b. These work even when writing SMS, though I doubt that the recipient actually recieves formatted text.

And my final comment is on adding recipients to messages: In the "To" field, just type in the first few characters of a contact's name, push the center key and if there is only one match, the contact is added to the list of recipients. If there are several matches, the phone will present you with a list where you can check boxes to add as many of the matching contacts as you want. To add another contact, just type the first few characters of his name and press the center button again.

I liked the M600 concept of a keyboard, and the P1i seems to build on that idea to create a fairly good looking device with 3G capability (and thus also the obligatory vidcam on the front).

I too am not a Blackberry fan, for a small business it's too much of an outlay to get push email and I like to be in control of my own resources (much safer, as PlusNet has -repeatedly- proven). So, back to SSL protected POP3 or IMAP and/or TLS protected SMTP - anyone wanting anything more urgent can call :-).

At present I have a W950, and this highlights the problem with the P1i (identical to the M600): why the heck so little memory? Is it to promote the sale of memory cards? If the W950 can have a whopping 4GB, what's the problem of fitting that in a phone that's substantially more costly? This is a phone with a medium resolution camera and ideas above its station (with 160MB) of being a music player, so give it at least the capacity to match.

Anyway, for me there will be 2 advantages of this phone that make it worth getting regardless: (1) it comes with an app that converts business cards into contacts and (2) it can handle navigation software. Yes, it also has WiFi but I don't expect that to be used much.

I wonder at the missing SE P1i comparison. I have the P990i and from reading the review, would suspect that it beats all your contenders hands down. How much better is the P1i? I do use the wifi capability quite a bit and use 'putty' for ssh/telnet connections to servers when troubleshooting them. I also have loaded PDF files, Word Docs, and Excel XLS files. I even created a spreadsheet for scheduling my engineers while sitting in a (yawn) tech briefing that was really a marketing session.

My big gripe with the Nokia calendar application (and all their phones suffer from this as far as I know) is that you can't schedule monthly appointments by day of the week. Say the first Tuesday of each month, for example.

Sadly, for a device aiming itself at the corporate world, it doesn't seem that they take the PIM functions seriously.

Why this is so, when my old Psion 5, the granddaddy of the Symbian/EPOC family had the best calendar app I've ever seen, is beyond me.

Come on Nokia, get it together!

You need to look deeper into customer preferences in order to have a useful comparison. Firstly, the comparison is way to biased against the E61i and second it does not highlight features that people actually use the most.

Example 1. Mac support, the Nokia should be 9/10 and Q9 should be 0/10. It is simple, Microsoft does not support the Mac for a good reason.

Example 2. Email/Calendar/Tasks. The right comparison is E61i with Blackberry Connect 4 vs. a real Blackberry vs. Q9. Here the Nokia offers the closest experience to a real blackberry including meetings, address lookup, etc. Alternatively, compare the Exchange clients. All other comparisons, IMAP, checking multiple accounts, etc. addresses such a small portion of the prospective buyers (may be 3% max) that it is not worth talking about.

Example 3. To do lists. The reason why to do lists on the devices are not full-featured is that the general customer does not use them. Look at some research before writing about a need that few care about.

Example 4. VoIP on Nokia. This is really the future especially for business executives that travel extensively and incur high roaming fees. Full integration, low power, etc. It is worth 50 points not 10. Basically, there are a few functions of the phone that people care about cellular calls, VoIP calls, email/meetings, browsing and multimedia. Everything else is not used by the majority.

Example 5. SMS sending. This is typically done by putting an SMS shortcut (one of seven possible) which results in sub 1 second sms send time on the E61i. Plus, you do have loose address string search within the sms application, just need to know how use it. It is OK to blame Nokia for not implementing the Blackberry functionality fully (sad) or that is has crippled the multimedia interface (sad) but to say that the Nokia sms application is flawed is just nuts since Nokia is widely acknowledged to have the best sms interface.

OK, and since now I got going, to some of the other posters: the P1i has not useable keyboard. Stop pitching this phone as an email solution. Same with the iPhone.

Gushter

Why have you never mentioned this phone as a decent BBerry replacement? I have used this for a few months now and I find it very useful.

My only gripes with it are more to do with T-Mobile disabling the WiFi and not offering the WM6 upgrade that the USA got a while back, though it is possible to get a version for it once the device is unlocked. Also it is not a 3G phone so suffers on the web browsing.

The battery life is fairly decent, it lasted for the whole of the Download Rock festival, (Thursday - Sunday) including lots of videos and pictures.

Here we go again.

While the IT press continues its fruitless search for a “Blackberry Killer”, the rest of the world is getting on with deploying devices that just work without endless hours of configuration and fine-tuning, need little or no maintenance, have a solid and secure infrastructure behind them, and deliver the services that really matter to businesses.

I laughed myself silly reading this article (well, not quite). How can you possibly produce a headline like that and not even include a Blackberry in the comparison. From the opening paragraphs, you seem to have little or no understanding of what large businesses really need from a handheld device, and scant knowledge even of what the latest Blackberry devices look like.

Keep searching, and get back to us when you’ve worked out what it is you’re looking for.

p.s. Did anyone mention Lotus Notes integration? No, I didn’t think so. Businesses don’t use it anyway, ……….do they?

Decide what you want.....

a toy....(oo ooh I need the latest gadget or people will think my d*ck has got smaller, never mind I've still got the BMW),

or................

a business tool that delivers value and has 'most importantly' lowest cost of ownership.

Until someone demonstrates how to manage a fleet of 500 varying aka lastest PDA's as cheaply and effectively as a BES can then go talk about this on hamley's website.

:-)

I love my E61i! A few comments about the details:

- You don't need to use two key presses to return to the standby screen, just hold down the application key.

- I've found writing SMS very easy. I have an icon on the standby screen (it was there by default), click once to get a blank sms, write the first few letters of the receipient, write the text and then send. If there is more than one person with the same letters in their name the phone prompts me for a match (and then a number if there are multiple numbers). My old samsung used to allow me to select from a recently used numbers list, but this can be a pain if you are never sending messages to the same person.

- Did you use the E61i for the first month? They have just released version 2 of Mail for Exchange and it is much better (but no where near where it needs to be). Also my phone, bought about 6 weeks ago, came with S60 3rd edition. My understanding is that this also saw a great improvement in the browser.

My company uses Lotus Notes and Blackberrys integrate perfectly with it (from an email point of view, at least - database integration is another matter entirely), I can't see a Windows Mobile offering that kind of integration with Notes any time soon...

>> With luck you'll be fast-tracked so you can skip the first day's training, which allegedly involves repeating the phrase "The customer is always wrong" several thousand times. A promising career awaits you in almost any British service industry. <<

It is nice to live in your own world but take a look at Nokia's market share (overall and smartphone), phone division profitability and sustainability of that profitability over the last 7 years. Then tell me who understands the customer better. Every company makes the wrong moves every now and then (except for RIM :) just Nokia makes fewer mistakes than Motorola for sure.

>> Overall, given the sluggishness of the device, the Q9 performed the same tasks in 3-5 seconds, which with the E61i took 10-15 seconds. <<

I played with a new device, could not understand how to make it work (because I do not know what shortcuts mean) but I would like to tell all readers that OVERALL the same task takes 3x longer... we were talking about sms sending and sms is incredibly fast on the E-series. Just accept the fact. Email is slower than average but that is another point.

>> the P1i has not useable keyboard <<

>> >>It's actually very usable - on a par with the squidgy E61i but not as good as the Q9. The Motorola's word recognition helps to speed things alot too. << <<

To each his own.

Gushter.

Motorola has issued several software updates for earlier Qs, which you can download and install at home. Go to this link and click "Update my Software." http://www.motorola.com/consumer/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=38b5f7c0c1a0b010VgnVCM1000008206b00aRCRD&show=globalSupport&ps=y&pg=PG_TYP_00001

Seems like the Q should pick up some points, or Nokia should lose 'em.

While Moto and Nokia release a new and soon to be defective product monthly, and Blackberry continue their path to becoming dinosaurs, Palm has released 5 of the most flexible smartphones ever, at a rate that shows their stamina and usefulness. If you office-types must, Treos have your windows mobile covered, and for those of us who want true flexibility (along with the excitement of hacking/rehacking), the Palm platform will remain the open source flagship smartphone, even after its move to Linux. I've been using a 650 for 3 years now, and am always finding new applications and configurations to tweak it to perfection. Given a little time, like any device worth its soldering joints, you'll end up with a solid, customizable device that any business can afford (I paid $500, but they're practically free now).

Stop tinkering with your E-blah blah-i model crapphones and get serious.

(and btw, regarding the iPhone, which really can't be compared to, well, anything, if you can't type on it, you're just not very coordinated, that's all)