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Something unusual is afoot. Gone are the days when business phones were uninspiring grey bricks picked up by suits alone. These days business phones jostle with their ‘traditionally’ snazzier-looking multimedia cousins in both the looks and the features departments. Cases in point, the phenomenal success of the Blackberry Pearl, and more recently, the hugely revamped E-Series from Nokia.
Take the new E71 for instance. Stepping out of the shadows of the headline grabbing N82, the E71 is a QWERTY smartphone with a large helping of oomph thrown in. For starters, it’s all of 10mm thick, making it not only the slimmest full QWERTY device on the market, but it’s also the slimmest smartphone yet seen, and that’s got to count for something.
It’s a tad wider than your average phone, but it fits in a full QWERTY keypad, and none of that two-letters-per-key-nonsense that the Pearl favours. Plus it’s attractive — less plastic, more chrome, and immensely pocketable. The E71 has lost the flab that is inherent to communication-oriented devices. So much so, I can’t think of a single thing Nokia sacrificed to make the device this thin and trim.
Of course, with the smaller size, Nokia had to cut down on screen real estate and keyboard spacing, but the good news is that since the keys are raised, it’s easy to get used to touch-typing with this keyboard, and after a day’s worth of hammering away at it, the keyboard is a pleasure to use.
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That said, there is a minor irritant — with a number keypad overlaid over the regular keypad, Nokia’s placed the ‘0’ key next to the ‘9’ key, and it takes a lot of patience to get number dialling right. The screen is reasonably sized, not too big though, and at 320 x 240 pixels is clear and bright enough for using outdoors.
There’s this interesting thing that Nokia’s added in the E71 called Mode Switching, the idea being that you can switch the phone from a business to lifestyle handset at the press of a button — akin to loosening your tie at the end of the day, if you will.
You get the choice of two home screens, each having its own theme, application shortcuts, standby plug-ins and wallpaper. For example, in Business mode, you’ll have immediate access to work tools, such as e-mail, the Web, and the file manager, and after hours, you can switch to Personal mode and have your music and photo gallery a click away.
Or you could, for instance, set-up your work and personal e-mail in the different modes, and switch off from work the moment you reach home. It’s an interesting concept, though I’m not sure if it will last past the first two weeks.
With the focus clearly on design, Nokia hasn’t scrimped on the E71’s feature set — you get A-GPS, WiFi, a 3.2 megapixel camera, A2DP Bluetooth, micro-USB, 110MB of built-in memory and a microSD slot, and tons of software to take advantage of all that tech, thanks to the now mature Series 60 Feature Pack 1 platform.
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It’s got 3G as well, and with a 3G policy being framed out as we speak, that’s reason to cheer. Being a business-first device, the E71 comes with a full set of office, e-mail and PIM software — the included QuickOffice 4.1 suite opens and edits even complex Microsoft Office 2003 documents easily, though it lacks support for Office 2007.
PDFs are fairly readable as well, with the included Adobe Reader LE. All this chugging along happily on the beefy 381-MHz ARM11 processor, and the only thing that slows it down occasionally is switching tracks on its music player.
Frustratingly though, with everything else as well thought out on the E71, the handset comes without a 3.5mm headphone socket, opting for the less commonplace 2.5mm type instead. Also, if music and video playback are key, the E71’s screen and interface are going to pose a slight challenge.
Under the covers, the E71 delivers what any self-respecting smartphone needs — a humongous 1500 mAh Li-Ion battery. It took me through three days of fairly heavy use — some Wi-Fi, some GPS, phone calls and some web browsing — to drain it down to a point where it could take no more.
I’m rather pleased with the E71 — it’s a powerful business phone with killer looks. If the screen size isn’t an issue for you, and you want something that’s good to hammer away e-mails at, while packed in with the absolutely most that this design can afford, it’s hard to walk away from the E71 without being impressed with it. If you walk away without it, that is.
Quick Specs
• Platform: Symbian OS 9.2, Series 60 3.1 edition
• Networks: Quad-band EGSM 850/900/1800/1900
• Data connectivity: HSCSD, GPRS, EDGE, HSDPA, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, Nokia PC Internet access (capability to serve as a data modem)
• Form factor: Monoblock with full keyboard
• Display: 2.36' 320 x 240 pixels (QVGA), upto 16 million colours
• Memory: Hot swappable microSD memory card slot, 110 MB internal memory
• Interfaces: Infrared, Bluetooth 2.0 EDR, Micro-USB, 2.5 mm Nokia AV connector
• Camera: 3.2 megapixel CMOS autofocus camera with LED flash
• Video: 640 x 480 at 22 fps capture (primary camera), 128 x 96 pixels/15 fps (secondary front-facing camera)
• Multimedia: Media player, FM radio
• GPS: Integrated A-GPS with Nokia Maps application
• Power sources: BP-4L 1500 mAh Li-Ion standard battery
• Talk/Standby time: 10 hours 30 mins, 17 days, 18 hours music playback
• Dimensions: 114 x 57 x 10 mm
• Weight: 127gm
• Rating: 9/10
• Price: Rs 22,949 plus taxes
• URL: http://www.nokia.co.in/A41155325
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Tricolour treat
We may buy foreign brands, prefer vacations overseas, but still get goosebumps listening to Lata Mangeshkar singing Ae mere watan ke logon.
Independence Day may be over but you can still celebrate its spirit with the new Logitech Tri Color mouse. It’s simple, yet strong enough to make a statement about your passion for the nation.
Optical sensors are old hat, though this one features Logitech’s integrated cord wrap feature. When you’re ready to move, you can wind the cord neatly into the mouse for easy packing.
• URL: http://logitech.co.in/
• Price: Rs 640