Nokia E71 review
So there’s this phone called the Nokia E71. It magically showed up on our doorstep yesterday (shout out to FedEx Sameday!) and was begging for us to review it. Well, we’re not going to disappoint you. In fact, there will be no disappointment at all as you’ll see in our review. The Nokia E71 has officially entered the ring, and it’s coming out fighting. Spoiler Alert: we love this phone. Full review is after the break!
Design:
Obviously this is subjective, but this could really be one of the sexiest damn phones we’ve seen in a very long time. We could do without the tacky pattern on the back battery cover, but we’ll let it slide this time. The entire phone is chrome and while it’s definitely a fingerprint magnet (just have your assistant wipe it down for you) it looks really sharp in person. Everything is proportionate and sort of just works well together. The middle select key actually serves as the notification light, too. So when you have a missed event, the border around the middle key will glow white until you cleared the event, or until the expiration time you set for the notification light expires. It’s a nice touch and a creative way to get rid of the annoying older-fashioned status light. Oh yeah…did we mention this thing is thin? Seriously, we don’t know how they did it. Especially with everything that’s packed in here…man, that BlackBerry Bold is just huge compared to this. Everyone is going to have to step it up after this because as of now, we can’t find one single thing Nokia sacrificed to make the device this thin and compact.
Screen:
There’s a 320×240 screen on the E71 and it looks very sharp. It’s not as bright as the N95, but it’s very clear and easy on the eyes. Screen real estate isn’t a problem at all as we find it more pleasurable to use than an N95. Pictures and video look very detailed and clean. There’s a decent amount of contrast when looking at media, and you’ll especially appreciate the screen during some heavy web browsing.
Connectivity:
The world must be changing. Remember when Nokia would hold every single feature above your head and never give you the perfect phone? Well, we’re finally getting past that. We’re not positive if there’s support for the 2100MHz band here, so for now, we’ll assume it doesn’t have it and there will be a US NAM model, and European model. In terms of the hard connectivity specs, you’ve got a quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE phone with 850MHz/1900MHz UMTS/HSDPA support, Wi-Fi 802.11 a,b,g, Bluetooth 2.0, and GPS. Like most recent Nokia’s, the GPS is assisted by the network, but fret not because there still is a physical GPS chip in here.
Sound:
Like the E61 and E61i before it, the E71 houses a single speaker in the upper left of the phone. It seems louder than the E61 and it’s pretty clear for ringtones and alert sounds. Music sounds fine on it, but it’s not perfect. Bass is seriously lacking and you do get a “tinny” sort of sound. It is very, very loud, though, so you can be sure that alarm is going to get your ass out of bed in the morning.
Email:
What good would an E-Series device be without email? Besides the normal POP3/IMAP supported protocols, Nokia’s Mail For Exchange comes with the device out of the box and is incredibly easy to setup. The handset supports BlackBerry Connect (though we didn’t actually try it) and we’d imagine Goodlink as well. The messaging application had a little bit of a visual makeover, and it’s for the better. Text is extremely readable and emails look great. We’d have loved to see support for HTML email, but oh well.
Keyboard:
If there had to be one negative to the E71 (relax, it’s not the end of the world) it’s going to be the keyboard. Again, not a huge deal, but if we had to pick one thing to single out it’s the keyboard and it quite possibly won’t bother you. It did annoy us, though. Think of the physical keys on the E71 the same as the E61, just a lot smaller. They’re also not as squishy which is nice, and they’re pretty easy to press once you get it down. Our issue is, again, Nokia has not learned the basic keyboard layout and we personally can’t stand it. On a normal QWERTY keyboard the letter “z” is not directly under the letter “a”. It’s either under the letter “s” or somewhere in between the two. This makes typing a royal bitch if you’re not looking directly at the keyboard and is totally unnecessary. All they had to do is stick the damn period key in front of the “z” key and all would be well. Again, this might not be a big deal to you if you’re coming from a QWERTY E-Series already, but for us hardcore freaks who bang away constantly on the keyboard, we’d like the normal layout that’s used on basically every other QWERTY phone on the planet. Fix it please, Nokia. The keys have a nice white backlighting which makes them very easy to read. Just like the other models, the actual keys don’t light up, just the letters and symbols which makes for a very clean and sexy look.
Something also interesting is the inclusion of predictive text on here. You might be thinking why you’d ever need predictive text when you’ve got a QWERTY keyboard, but it actually helps more than it gets in the way. It sort of works like how the iPhone does. If you’re typing fast and accidentally misspell a word but keep typing and hit the space bar, it will auto correct and suggest that word for you. It can also save you a good amount of typing time as it will suggest words for you when you are halfway through them and a simple press of the space bar selects the suggested word and keeps you moving.
Expandability:
There’s a microSD card slot right above the microUSB port on the handset, so you should be able to expand the memory of the phone to the largest microSD card you can find. We haven’t checked data transfer speeds to the memory card over USB yet, but we’re assuming it’s on par with the rest of the Nokias.
Call quality:
Nokia and call quality go together like ham and burger. Kool-Aid and sugar. The E71 doesn’t disappoint. We’ve had such a pleasurable experience with it that we’ve been calling people randomly just to talk on the phone. In all seriousness, it meets or exceeds what we’ve come to expect and love from Nokia. A phone that excels as a phone, as it should. It actually went toe-to-toe with our BlackBerry Curve in terms of holding onto a signal in low coverage areas. And all you BlackBerry lovers out there know that RIM makes one hell of a cell radio in those things.
Battery:
There’s a 1500mAh battery in the E71, and with a full day of heavy use like constant email, phone calls, web browsing, and all around messing with the phone, we’ve still got around 2 bars left. There should be no concern with the battery life here.
Conclusion:
We’re at the end of the review, but by now, you’ve seen how impressed we are with the phone. It takes a lot to get us excited but the E71 has done it. This thing, in our opinion, is the best phone Nokia has made to date. That’s a very bold statement, we know. But this really is going to be the phone to beat by a lot of manufacturers. From the design, to the specs, to the size, the feel — it has the entire package. It’s not for everyone, though. Some people prefer a straight up phone like a flip phone, but in terms of a smartphone with a QWERTY keyboard, this takes the cake. It is just striking compared to the shit device the E61 was. It’s ok, we still love y’all that carry the E61, but this puts it to shame. One thing I personally can’t get over is the awesome dimensions of the device. It’s so perfectly thin, yet incredibly comfortable to hold and use. We just hope Nokia doesn’t wait too long to bring this to market as they need to strike now. Like right now. This second. After seeing all of the detailed shots and our impressions, how do you guys feel about the phone? Are you foaming at the mouth waiting for it or ice-grillin’ us?
This is truely what we are waiting for in my sector!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! i can’t wait to get one.
my E71 is coming tomorrow and I’m like a kid at Christmas …… why are the hours taking so long!!!
Got it in at work (Best Buy) the other day. First time I laid eyes on it I pulled it out and couldnt shut up about it. I’m in love <3 Enough that I popped the sim card out of my blackberry and into the E71 for a few hours. And showed it off to almost everyone in the store. I love the feel of the buttons almost orgasmic. I might cheat on my Curve (which I got in april) and buy the E71 outright.
i’ve had this thing for a month now and absolutely LOVE it!
nice upgrade from a blackberry curve…
i owned this phone like on End of July…it’s a very good phone and user friendly…nice phone to have if you are travelling and u can always check your email or browse the web with it’s WI-FI
I am writing this comment using my e71 and the opera mini browser at same time as listening to mp3’s and using the propriety browser to check the news and using gps with google earth and its been a day since charging and the phone is simply not slowing at all! This is a very clever device and its only real fault (Imho the keyboard is perfect) is the camera at night. My old n73 was similar however so not much of a gripe. Also a must is getting hold of vsun (snes emu) it runs so well and even though this device doesn’t feature any actual 3d architecture it runs mario cart like a dream
..the only thing the 3g iphone does better is make lightsabre noises.. If you are a power/business user GET THIS PHONE.
I love my E71. I played with it non stop from the moment it was delivered at 1.30pm (Friday). I was very surprised by the battery life, it didn’t run out until Sunday evening.
I love the keyboard and took to using qwerty again very quickly. The buttons are all slightly raised so you can type quite quickly with your thumbs by just sliding over the keys.
My old phone was an LG Viewty which i got purely because of it being a touch phone. I do miss the 5m pixel camera but my hubby has that phone now so we still have the ability to take bigger pictures and video’s in AVI format. This was a great pro to the LG which the Nokia doesn’t have.
I am a little disappointed by how long it took to figure out the bloody email, however that could be because I’m not “wid it” when it comes to technology. Its all working now and love that I can email people during the day while I’m out instead of using all my texts and being able to send pictures too is great. I no longer have to use 4 text messages to send MMS.
Overall, love this phone! and I can’t see me needed to upgrade for a while.
I am so glad this review is good- it is the first one I have read and it has made me extremely happy as I am getting this phone in a couple of days!
Can’t wait!
I agree- the design is beautiful. I was also amazed that they were able to make the phone so slim!
So excited=]
Good review!
Hey … wondering any one have any idea on which phone better?
Nokia E71 or Samsung i780 ?
Brilliant ! Informative ! Useful!
My husband just bought me a Nokia E71. However, the phone gets very hot after I used it (talk) for a few minutes. Anybody else had the same problem??
IC
I never tought to change the blackberry device with another “simple” mobile phone.
I owned BB 8707v, 8100 pearl, 8300 and 8320.
Blackberry is a powerfull device…but imho is not “open” as a symbian phone or a winmobile phone.
I owned for a couple of months Asus p750 (bought to use with blackberry service but i found that Asus never signed the contract with RIM…) and i found the mobile phone quite good. Then i tried the nokie e71 and i bought one because i found it very powerfull and the right mix of tools and functions for my daily use.
I hope nokia will improve its email service to support multiple account, i’m satisfied just now…but one account is a strong limitation for me.
I’m trying another program to emulate the PUSH service called SEVEN (http://www.seven.com/), at the moment it is free and it supports more than one account. It works great!
Can this E71 display Chinese? Or say is there any language selection option?
Thanks for answering the questions first!
this phone looks amazing im ordering mine tomorrow
Hi Michelle,
My phone supports Chinese text and writing (simplified and traditional) in addition to English. I bought the phone in Hong Kong.
rbt
Just received this phone and what a relief , after using a blackberry pearl this is just so much better , a joy to use and dare i say it has fun built into it (unlike those killjoys at Blackberry ) using on 3 network in UK .forget those namby pamby MP3 phones i will be busy playing tunes on this (while working of course) .Note to employers it actually
helps the daily chore of work
I am sold to get this phone after several months of waiting to upgrade. I waited for the iPhone 3G but it didn’t have a video recorder which I really don’t need but would have been nice to have. I had my eyes set on the LG Vu, LG Viewty, and then the Nokia N95 8G. I don’t need to watch tv on my phone and have a 5mp as one either. It is a great idea but a phone is just that and shouldn’t be your whole entertainment system.
Anyways, I read the reviews and saw more than I need to. I am going to get this phone period.
My question is, does it sync with Macbooks? I only saw one person ask and didn’t read a response to it. Either way if it does or not, I am still going to get this phone.
Nokia, YOU ROCK!!!
Peace.
I have bought Nokia E71 y’day……… its good product…. but few things i am unable 2 make it out. 1) where is the SMS counter. 2) where do i find my folders (which i created in inbox) if i use Nokia PC suite. 3) i cant see it, ya how do i copy my sms from old phone sms folderes to new one. if anyone know about it plz mail it 2 me.
regards
I cant wait. This is the phone i have been waiting for. I hope its coming out like yesterday. One thing i didnt see mentioned in the review was the interface speed. Does it crawl like the E61 and E62? Or is it so fast that there is no comparison? I hope its coming to ATT or T-Mobile very soon
The E71 does not allow users to change from Automatic over to Manual. This basic setting means that the carrier can charge its customers a fortune for roaming.
Quite simply the phone is not fit for its purpose.
Buy this phone if you want excessive calling and data charges!
I have a BT3010 jabra bluetooth headset and Nokia E71 mobile. But looks like there are not compatible. My mobile E71 does not even recognize this bluetooth device.
Please advise
Sangram
This is an awesome phone thus far from Nokia. I have been an avid fan of the communicator series since the days of 9110 communicator and have used 4 models with the last being the E90. I find this chic E71 a very good alternative to my communicator as it has everything that the communicator has and is fits well into my shirt pocket unlike the communicators where I need a pouch to holster to my belt, if I have one at that time. I am currently using both my E90 & E71 for business and leisure. You know which for which…
Nokia E71 has a symbian software. Can i install blackberry software?
what about copy paste options!!!!
can u copy something on sms and then pastae it to a word profile or somewhere else!!!!??
tx
i’m a die-hard sonyericsson freak and hv only used their phones in the last 8years. i just got d e71 as a birthday gift and i must say it just might be the phone dat converts me to d nokia cult. but i do miss one thing– d smileys dat came as standard on sonyericsson phones. pls boygenius how can i get my beloved smileys back?