Nokia E71: mini-review
Got it this morning, so this is not what you’d call a complete review.
Nice build quality. Getting the back cover off was a bit of a trial, not sure if that’s because I’ve got big fingers or because it’s meant to be difficult, but it’s not something you do often.
The keyboard is pretty decent. I’ve not used a QWERTY phone before so can’t compare it with the competition. But it’s hugely more efficient for text entry than a simple numeric pad. Takes some getting used to though as the keys are necessarily quite small.
The screen is very pretty, but a lot of the text is fairly small even with the font setting set to “large”. I’m not sure if anything at all pay any attention to that setting. On the bright side it’ll read out incoming messages, though bizarrely that option isn’t available for stuff in your sent folder.
I chucked a demo copy of Mobile Speak on it but frankly that’s more irritating than squinting.
My one real complaint is with the SIP support, which was one of the factors that made me decide to get a Series 60 phone. Outgoing calls seem to be OK — though I’ve had some trouble there too — but incomings are particularly irritating. The handset doesn’t seem to reliably stay registered so it misses calls, and even when it receives them they aren’t treated like normal calls: you can’t answer simply by pressing the call-answer button, and they don’t appear in the call logs.
This is a bit of a bummer as I’d been hoping to use this as a “one handset to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them”. Turns out not so much.
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