E71 NAM Starts Hitting Nokia Flagship Stores
In typical Nokia fashion, it looks like the E71 has quietly started to hit the shelves here in the US. According to the E71blog, the Nokia Flagship Store in Chicago has already received its first shipment of E71s and has already begun contacting those on the waiting list. Apparently only the gray version is currently in stock and there’s no word on when the white version might be available. To clarify, we are indeed talking about the US version of the E71, aka E71 NAM aka E71-2, with AT&T-compatible dual band WCDMA (850/1900MHz). US 3G indeed! We gave a call over to the NYC to see what their story was and we were informed that there would be a “launch party” on Thursday evening. Basically, if you’re on the list you’ll get a call and you can head over to the store on Thursday to wait in line for your new handset. There’s also a second list for the next shipment but we assume that any no-shows will become available to people on list number two as well. So congrats if you’re on the list; $480 and you’re on your way with one of the hottest handsets that will come out this year. Everyone else should expect other retailers to start getting shipments in the next couple of weeks.
Just effing with u guy… I know how proud u are of that Tilt! It has everything…except flash.
@GIAN:
Maybe they stand in line for the iPhone over Nokia’s because Nokia has treated the US like a baby treats a diaper. They take really good care of their European customers but they send us only a handful of devices that are quad band US and Global 3G. This iPhone killer doesn’t have 2100 UTMS but the iPhone does. Meaning if I want to use 3G when I travel overseas, I can on the iPhone but not this “killer” device.
Everybody creams themselves over the S60 platform but in my experience it usually is very sluggish. I recently had a Nokia N95-4 and took it back within a week. No native Exchange Sync and no HTML mail. Reading mail on S60 is like reading it on an old Blackberry. You have to hack around with it to get a decent font and the QVGA screens of the Nokia’s don’t come close to the iPhones.
And lets talk about apps. The 3D graphics engine on the iPhone kills everything accept a gaming console. Nothing handheld can touch it. Even a PSP or DS. The games on S60 devices look more like those Java and Brew games that you get on your Moto Razor. Not as bad as bad mind you, but no where near as good as the iPhone. The iPhone also had more than 500 apps available for it when the App Store launched. More are added every day and library will only continue to grow.
Then there is the price and availability. From what I heard, unless you live in Chicago you are out of luck getting this device as they won’t ship out of the area. Most will have to pay a premium on top of the asking price for this from a third party seller. The prices are outrageous for these things. $749 was the price of the Nokia N95-4. Wait and get this from AT&T and it may be cheaper but most of those “cool” features will probably be missing and the OS hacked up. At least with the iPhone, AT&T can’t dictate the OS.
Add that to the fact that Nokia now has the Chinese build their products and I say we have some questionable quality control issues. Most of the complaint that I read about the N95 and other Nokia’s of late is the cheap feeling build quality. The N95 certainly had an awfully cheap feel for nearly an $800 device with tax.
That being said, if I didn’t have the iPhone, I’d probably go for a Nokia only because I hate Microsoft’s platform and am not crazy about Blackberry. However, I still feel that Nokia doesn’t offer much to it’s US customers except higher prices.
hey guys i just got this phone yesterday and i LOVE it!! theres only one thing that really bugs me.. the icons… i have tried downloading several different themes to get the old series 60 icons back.. i hate the e71 icons… does anyone know where i can find an original nokia theme from like the e61i with the icons?
thanks
i’ve heard through the grapevine that the nokia flagship stores do activations with carriers as well and can give discounts for new activations on purchases. can anyone confirm this for me? thanks.
must get phone, must use phone….
That’s great, but they won’t sell more than a few dozen of these unless it supports Blackberry out of the box (which it doesn’t). RIM handsets suck balls, but they have a virtual monopoly on corporate users that want these type of phones. Goodlink is a nice start but that is about 5% of the market and most of the users are Treo anyway — I don’t see them abandoning that (superior) platform for this phone, even if the specs are super-duper awesome.
@chicagoE
Why not call the Flagship store and ask? And let us know your findings.
I just called the Chicago Flagship store and they do not do activations. $483 was the price for a grey one and they were in stock!!!
Finally a phone Im interested in! Oh wait I already have one but now I can get US 3G on it! NICE!!
This looks to be one of the coolest phones out!
homer:
i’m not even sure what an exchange sync is but i know if you want push email to you phone nokia has a new service out just like blackbarry and they do it for free its called my.nokia or something like that. i personally do very minimal emailing on my phone and only when there is wi-fi connection because its free and i have a nice gmail app that does the job for me, the rest of the time i have a pc for that.
as for a US 3G connection, Nokia will have a E71 US 3G version, nough for that.
as far as apps are concerned, trust me there is no other platform with more apps than symbian S60, Nokia dominates the smartphone market worldwide and this thing is about to go open source which means that more handset manufacturers will base their platform on the leading OS which it already is, so it will only continue to grow (they already have over 60% smartphone market share).
the screen is not as nice as the iphone, but from what i can tell this screen is very nice too and doesnt make me think gee, i wish my phone had a better screen every time i look at it! i love the key board and no touchscreen will ever convince me that it will be better for writing on it! its a trade off.. smaller screen but at least i can write on it, i prefer to write rather then look at a larger screen with no buttons.
i do agree with you that nokia isnt the best at marketing, hats off to apple for that, but at the same time apple marketed the iphone as if it were the best phone out there and thats not true which implies that they’re dishonest to the consumers. nokia should learn from apple about marketing and they wouldnt even need to lie about their products to sell.
one thing i wanted to mention about carriers in the US, they are blood suckers and nokia pretty much ignores them because they believe that carriers at some point will come and kiss their ass, but this strategy is wrong and it shows based on the market share they have in the US. they need to go to them like apple did and have them subsidies their products without touching the OS. because the OS rocks and the reason carriers dont like them is because there are so many apps out there that would pretty much erase carrier usage occasionally if ur near a wi-fi hotspot since nokia allows you to have voice over ip (VoIP) and make calls for free.
again, the iphone does not come near the E71 in any category except for the larger screen! i have 3D navigation with tomtom and navigon on it, an awesome radio, mms, 3.2mp cam, video recording, wi-fi b/g, 8GB mcroSD, its quick, highly customizable, rock solid operating system, its high quality (i dropped it the other day for the first time and except for a scratch it all works fine, now if it was an iphone i would need to replace the screen by now), and its super handy in size.
there are so many ways you can use this phone, its really not only for businesses, i would recommend this phone to anyone who even just makes calls because the call quality is so superb.
i almost went for the iphone good thing i saved my 99 bucks (would have been 600+ in the long run with all the stupid carrier plans!)
one more thing, symbian is a proven solid leading OS, iphone is not proven.
@Gian:
I never said this device didn’t have US 3G. What I said was that it lacks the 2100 band so NO 3G if you travel overseas.
This device does not support blackberry and the Nokia Exchange Sync or whatever it is called is subpar. No HTML mail. How this is considered a “business” device I don’t know.
And I am sorry but the Mac OS X is more rock solid than S60. The iPhone is using a version of a real OS. Symbian is just not as well liked as most Nokia users would like to think. It’s better than WM but trust me as someone, unlike yourself that has used both the iPhone and Symbian, iPhone is more stable and much faster. The iPhone processor is faster, the 3G video chip is faster, and the OS is more stable. With Garmin, TomTom, and RIM licensing software for the iPhone, and a barrage of software developers writing for the iPhone, you will see Nokia, like everyone else, trying to play catch up with Apple. Oh, wait… they already are… isn’t it called The Tube?
I will say again so you don’t get the impression that I’m promoting a flame war, that I would probably use a Symbian device before WM or RIM. But with Apple in the picture, no way.
Oh, and I don’t see how you can comment on the iPhone at all since you didn’t actually buy and use one. If you think it’s not durable, you should check some of the endurance tests on YouTube. That screen is nearly impossible to scratch or break and if you do, nine times out of ten Apple will replace it if you have Apple care. I don’t think Nokia’s going to take care of you on yours if you drop it again and break it. And since there’s no carrier subsidy, you don’t have any support channels except to send it in to Nokia.
@Evilhomer:
The eula for the iPhone SDK specifically states that you are not allowed to make/distribute software that gives turn by turn directions using the GPS.
From what I’ve seen, GPS usage murders the battery quickly so they prefer it be used in a “turn on, use agps to get a lock quickly, and immediately turn off” manner. It’s great for tagging photos with location in the EXIF, or for saying “oh ok that’s where I am” in google maps, but that’s about it right now.
I’m so very excited about the E71, even though I am one who waited in line all morning at the Apple store, only to be told bt AT&T (had to call them) that I was two weeks before eligibility for an upgrade and would have to pay $499 for the phone. I’m sorry, if I’m going to spend that much on a phone it needs to at least be able to send MMS (yes, I use MMS often, though I bet I could get by just uploading to flickr and telling people to check my flickr –just more cumbersome).
I’m still waiting for Nokia to blow my mind by releasing a successor to the N810 complete with WCDMA and a decent (5 megapixel+) camera. That would be an epic sorta pocketable computerphone.
http://www.popularelect.com got them, i ordered mine there and also gave me the tracking number how cool i cant wait to play with it.
Obviously Evilhomer is having second thoughts about his iPhone, thats why he checked out this story. Evilhomer, if you would have waited a couple more weeks, you would been able to get a real mobile device like the E71. Dont worry, Im pretty sure there will be an E71 successor in 2 years when youre eligible for an upgrade.
This is where i bought mine from about a month ago.
http://www.importgsm.com/product.php?productid=491&cat=0&page=1
currently they’re sold out.
forgot to add that they’re selling them for the lowest price i could find on the net.
$449
not bad.
…and it’s a BOMB AS* PHONE!!!! MY FRIENDS!!
homer:
how this mobile version of mac os x will turn out to be no one knows. however, how symbian will turn out to be everyone knows because it’s been around on smartphones since the beginning of smartphones, basically it’s the mother of all smartphones. so don’t tell me it’s not a proven stable platform and once it will be open source which nokia has pledged to make it then my friend you will have the birth of a new generation of advanced mobile platforms based on symbian. you can do a lot more with it than what we have seen and only Jobs is someone who can live in denial and try to come up with their own mobile platform and try to play catch up in the coming years which i can only foresee the turn out to be same as with their pc buisiness, namely own a mediocre market share. Symbian OS is the Windows OS of smartphones and only people in the US don’t know that yet because they haven’t had the pleasure of using it yet since nokia ignores the stupid demands the US carriers have.
Sure, i agree that phones need to be subsidized by carriers in order the masses can afford & enjoy them so i give a minus on nokia for that. At the same time, carriers shall not be allowed to tell a phone manufacturer how to make phones. The carriers sole purpose should be to increase the capacity of their network and we all know the future lies on the next platform which is LTE 4G network which by the way is done by nokia siemens. we here in europe are looking forward to that in the next couple years whereas the US just barely rolled out their 3G network.
what the future of the iphone will be is hard to say, if it has the success of the ipod and can own that much market share (which i doubt nokia will allow that to happen) then we can talk, till then it will be just a niche product catching up and luring customers with dishonest ads, again in most ways it is years behind.
On Jul 23, 2008 @ 1:30 am, This Guy Said:
Obviously Evilhomer is having second thoughts about his iPhone, thats why he checked out this story. Evilhomer, if you would have waited a couple more weeks, you would been able to get a real mobile device like the E71. Dont worry, Im pretty sure there will be an E71 successor in 2 years when youre eligible for an upgrade.
Right. That’s why I returned that N95-4, the current flagship phone. The only 2nd thought I had about the iPhone was wether to get the black or white model. I, like most business smartphone users, am not impressed with Symbian. That’s why most choose WM or RIM.
Can someone explain the radio/modes the E71-NAM has ?
So I can use WiFi everywhere in the world.
And I get _fast_ data in US and canada.
But where can I talk ? Can I talk in all of Europe / Japan / rest_of_asia ? Is there anywhere I cannot talk ?
Also, where can I get slow data ? Can I get slow data in the rest of the world ? Where can I _not_ get slow data ?
Thanks.
Damn it… Why can’t they combine the Camera in the N95-4 with the E71. I would jump on it in a heartbeat… The keyboardless N95 bugs the hell out of me…
Nokia E-mail sync is 1,000,000 times better then the stupid e-mail software the device comes with.. And I get bettery battery life with 3G push mail then having to check for messages all the time… I got the N95-4 for 449 after coupons and a discount Dell had a month or so ago… Otherwise I’d be all over this.. I had the Iphone V1 and no way am I getting a 3G…. Its a useless crippled device (I am an apple fanboi Macbookpro and a Mac Pro at home) but I refuse to buy a phone that has a subpar camera and is bluetooth handicapped… I don’t want to have to hack my phone to be able to use it out of the box.