Original URL: https://www.theregister.com/2008/07/17/review_nokia_e71/

Nokia E71 smartphone

It's a marvel how much geeky goodness is packed into a device this thin

By Dave Oliver

Posted in Personal Tech, 17th July 2008 12:11 GMT

Review The follow-up to the E61 is lighter and thinner, yet packs a 3.2-megapixel camera, push email, HSDPA 3G, a better keyboard, more memory and AGPS... and no Pop-Port.

Nokia often likes to push the style boat out for a little tour round fashion victim harbour. But when it knuckles down and applies its design experience to practical matters, there are few who can touch it.

Nokia E71

Nokia's E71: possibly the thinnest Qwerty phone in the world

The E71 business phone is a case in point. It has a Qwerty keyboard and large screen, so therefore it has to be a brick, right? Not when that brick has dimensions that are more akin to a playing card – big and wide when you look at it one way, but almost disappearing when you look at it from the right angle.

Nokia claims the E71 is the slimmest full Qwerty keyboard phone available, and at just 57mm wide, we're inclined to believe it. It's 11mm thick. The handset is even thinner than the normally svelte Blackberry Curve with its now rather portly-seeming 60mm dimension.

Despite the E71's thinness, its metal case adds a certain weight and gravitas, though at 127g it's hardly excessive. It's on the wide side, of course, to make room for that keyboard, but though it's necessarily tightly packed, the curved, rubberised buttons, which sit slightly proud of the face, are easy enough to use.

The keys are rigid, with reliable feedback, unlike the spongy ones on the E71's predecessor, and while the numeric keypad is incorporated into the alphabetical one, it's automatically favoured from the home screen. Predictive text is included, which helps to speed up texting times by suggesting words as you type, and we found it just as easy to use with both thumbs as with one.

The square navpad above the keyboard is responsive and easy to use, plus it illuminates and doubles as the phone's alert light, informing you when you have unread messages pending. It's flanked by four shortcut keys for Home, Calendar, Contacts and Messages.

Nokia E71

The 3.2Mp camera seems a little lacklustre in the face of the competition

On those slim sides Nokia has still managed to squeeze volume and voice dialling buttons, plus a mini USB port and a Micro SD slot. The top-mounted loudspeaker is reassuringly loud.

All your most popular applications are on the home screen, including your mailbox, email set-up, VoIP set-up, calendar entries, Wi-Fi scanner and any pending voice messages. The time and date are displayed too, as is a series of six shortcut icons: Messages, Browser, Maps, Notes, File Manager and a mode switch.

As if to underline the fact that there are two sides to the E71, that mode switch allows you to toggle between different home screens and email accounts – one for work, one for play, say. It's hardly essential but we got a childish kick from using it to metaphorically loosen our tie at the end of the day.

The screen is a good size at 2.4in, 320 x 240. It displays up to 16m colours, which is surely enough for anybody, and it's startlingly clear and sharp, with a good sense of depth. It's plenty bright too, and proved to be perfectly legible even in near-direct sunlight with the brightness whacked up full.

Connectivity-wise the E71 has Wi-Fi, Bluetooth with A2DP stereo, USB (replacing the E61's limited Pop-Port) and, unusually these days, an infrared port. There's also a 3.6Mb/s HSDPA connection, though the actual speed will depend on your network and location. Like virtually everything about this phone, the Wi-Fi proved to be painlessly efficient, hooking us up to our network without fuss or complaint.

Nokia E71

No Pop-Port here

Web browsing thereafter was a pleasure, with the screen's proportions lending themselves well to web pages. There are options to flip through previous pages and zoom in on page details, though it's limited to between 50 and 125 per cent. You can elect to view pages full screen – handy for streaming video. You can also choose whether or not to allow pop-ups or show pictures, and there's a handy search function to help you find elusive words on screen.

Nokia's Mail For Exchange service offers push email, which certainly puts the E71 in the running for convenience with the BlackBerries of this world. Email was incredibly easy to set up too. All we needed was our email address and password, and we had a POP3 account spraying our inbox with electronic missives in less than a minute.

The phone's very quick in operation. Its 369MHz ARM processor proved to be more than nippy enough to handle everything on the Symbian S60 platform. Even when we had several apps running at once, it just kept pumping.

It's a sign of the times that the 3.2-megapixel camera - without one of Mr Carl Zeiss' famous lenses - now seems a little lacklustre in the face of stiff competition. Still, it offers 2048 x 1536 maximum resolution, has an LED photo light, an extended digital zoom which you can still use it even when you're at highest resolution, autofocus and red-eye reduction. OK, so it can't keep up with Nokia's N-series cameraphones or Sony Ericsson's Cyber-shot series, but the snaps are nothing to be ashamed of.

Video, as we've come to expect, is of lesser quality, but the E71 will still produce decent footage worthy of YouTube. The movement blur isn't too debilitating though you can see the compression artefacts and there's quite a lot of noise, especially in less-than-ideal lighting conditions. That said, Nokia's photo editing suite is one of the best you'll find on cameraphones, with loads of options for doctoring your pics.

Nokia E71

For some weird reason it features a 2.5mm headphone port

There's an Assisted GPS facility on board - the integrated GPS pick-up is given a boost by data sent over the network - bundled with Nokia's Maps application. Pretty good it is too if you happen to find yourself in a tight spot, though it's a bit of a squint to use regularly as a driving aid, especially when compared with dedicated satnav devices.

Voice direction is available as a downloadable add-on for £7 a month, and you can get traffic info for a further £3 a month. There's also geo-tagging for your photos and links to Nokia's Ovi file-sharing site.

Nokia's music player is functional without being fancy and makes a good fist of sorting and playing your music, with all the major formats covered, including MP3, WMA and AAC. There's 110MB of storage on board and you can expand it with hot-swappable Micro SD memory cards of up to 8GB capacity. Nokia's FM radio, by the way, remains one of the best currently available.

Frustratingly, with everything else near as darn perfect on the E71, the handset comes without a 3.5mm headphone socket - it has the now much less commonplace 2.5mm type instead.

The supplied headphones are functional at best, and though certainly not the worst bundled headphones we've tried, they do sound unpleasantly 'shut in' without sufficiently wide dynamic range.

Nokia E71

Despite its thinness, the metal case adds a certain weight and gravitas

QuickOffice4 is pre-loaded to allow you to read and create Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. It's joined by Adobe Reader for viewing PDFs. There are also all sorts of extras bundled in too, including a barcode reader, a text scanner (very accurate with small batches of text), wireless keyboard connector, Push To Talk, WorldMate travel information, Psiloc Wireless Presenter for remote controlling PowerPoint presentations and more.

Battery-wise, we found it still going strong after two days of moderate use, though it probably would have been less without the phone automatically logging out of our WLAN when it wasn't in use.

Verdict

The Nokia E71 is a brilliantly efficient piece of technology that does pretty much everything you might want it to do and it does it all extremely well. Like a technological servant of sorts, it serves up its many excellent facilities and a host of other titbits with a minimum of fuss - and no small amount of style.