To cut the story down to bare facts – i first ordered the Nokia E71 at the start of November from Amazon Market Place. A month later, no contact from the seller and i’ve been ripped off. Well, the dude tried to rip off Amazon. I’ve filled a claim for my money back which i shall hear back from shortly. Since the filling, I’ve bought a new one, direct from Amazon. Yesterday i received an email saying it had shipped, and then moments later (literally) it turned up. Think the email was delayed as it stated it was shipped on the 27th.
And was I happy. Although i was at work and couldn’t really drill into all the features. Never before have I been that excited over a phone. But there was so much build up to it, and after using the iPhone for almost two years, my tactile sense has been virtualised and abandoned. I’ve been in dire need of a click to know i’ve pressed a button. And boy does the Nokia E71 have buttons.
Apple hate buttons. In fact, they acknowledge this with every product they make. Making them minimalistic as possible. And it looks good too. However, there is a downside to having minimal buttons. For example, the iPhone has four mechanical buttons. Sleep, Vol up, Vol down, and Home. The touch screen is used to have virtual buttons and control the device.
This is a horrible way to type though. Touching an area on a piece of glass to activate a function has no physical feed back. It’s the exact same idea as those horrible see-through calculators from the late 80s. The buttons wouldn’t respond if you didn’t touch them precisely and you had to look at the calculator all the time.
Nokia E71 has a full QWERTY keyboard, cramped it may be, but surprisingly usable. I’ve only misspelled a couple words so far.
BTW, this shouldn’t be taken as “I hate iPhones, i hate Apple”. I still have my iPhone and will probably keep it to use as an iPod touch. It’s a great device for surfing the web. Safari is the best mobile browser out there. Perfect for what the touch screen interface is designed for. Same with iTunes. Best mobile media player with beautiful cover art. There are also games on the iPhone are amazing. But when it comes to writing emails, attaching documents, downloading unknown file types, having a filesystem to do this all – iPhone is left for dead. Also, when i refer to iPhone, i’m talking about my iPhone 3g. Not the latest iPhone 3gs, as that costs about 3x the amount of my Nokia and runs a bit smoother than it’s predecessor.
Here are some of the features i’ve been missing from my iPhone and that Apple will probably never bring:
- battery life – since charging it last night and using it all today, making calls, texting, checking email, using bluetooth, it’s at about 85% capacity
- you can tell it when to check for work emails, mon-fri, between the hours of 8am and 6pm)
- it turns off things that drains power when it about to run out of juice, such as data comms (bt/wifi/3g/gps/email) and screen brightness, leaving enough juice to make and receive calls
- text-to-speech – reads messages (not email though?), menu items and announces who’s calling when the phone rings.
- maps – seriously, awesome. Apple did a great job at google maps, but what they failed at is caching. If you go out of reception or roam, you don’t get any maps or they’ll cost you. Nokia allow you to download (for free) most of the world. UK files are about 230mb, whereas NZ is a paltry 17mb. Included with maps is turn by turn navigation for proper GPS navigation (car usage)
- message notification – a light flashes when a message hasn’t been read.
- applications such as Fring! (VOIP) allow you to use VOIP over 3g/edge.
- can take videos
- has a flash on the 3.2mb autofocus camera
- the home screen has information displaying calendar events, latest messages etc
- voice dialling is pretty accurate
- hspda modem
- web page loading and downloads are very fast compared to the iPhone (even though it’s the same network/account)
- there aren’t any cutesy riffs/sound effects. All notification’s can be customised.
- voice quality is awesome, crystal clear phone conversations
- paring with OS X was fine, although PC suite software is Windows only currently, however they are developing a Linux and OS X version which sounds like it will be out early 2010
- PC suite was surprisingly awesome for a Windows application
The downside of things i’ve noticed are:
- headphones are 2.5mm (not the standard 3.5mm) and make crackly sounds
- sound quality for media is horrible
- email was pretty hard to get sorted. After playing with it last night it said, “do you want to install Nokia mail?” even though I thought I was setting Nokia mail up?! Then all of a sudden it worked awesomely.
- Initial setup of networks was frustrating and kept asking “do you want to connect?” but it hasn’t asked me today
- themes are kinda shitty, nothing compares to the iPhone UI
To sum it up, I’m very happy with my Nokia E71. The downsides such as music quality/headphones etc – it’s not a toy like the iPhone. It’s a tool. For more than half the price of an iPhone, and for far more features its worth getting. If you want a smartphone for playing with and being amazed by pinching auto rotating etc – get the iPhone. If you want a smartphone to use for business and not to autorotate (especially when lying on your side in bed reading news) with great features.. get something like this.
here’s the amazing PC suite app (Windows only):
