Maxit Mag - Nokia E61 Review

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Nokia E61 Review

Written by Maxit

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Nokia E61 Review
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The Keyboard

The best feature of this phone has to be its QWERTY keyboard. The keys are very well arranged and large enough to feel comfortable in use. Although the keyboard requires getting used to, theres nothing to complain about for even the chubbiest of fingers. We found the soft keys and call/end keys that are placed above the keyboard a little too slim and wide but the 5-way navigation pad is just about perfect.

Display

The screen deserves a special mention. It is a 2.8" 320x240 landscape QVGA non-touchscreen LCD that sets itself apart from the rest by being a true 16 million color screen. This comes with a light sensor that adjusts the brightness depending on the lighting conditions making the display readable even under direct sunlight.

OS Features and Applications

The phone runs on the Symbian S60 v9.1 3rd Edition OS. The OS is pretty fast and responsive unlike the N-Series or other older S60 phones.

The E61 boasts lots of useful business software: printer management, presentation support (via USB), spreadsheet and word processing via QuickOffice's goodness, a zip application, WorldMate (view the weather/time on 3 cities at the same time), voicemail, notes, calculator, a units converter, speed dial, GPS support (via an external bluetooth GPS module or via GSM triangulation), a Macromedia Flash player (no browser plugin though) and voice command.

The OS itself supports themes, profiles, and lots of third party applications. More and more applicaitons are being ported to this new platform everyday and this is one feature that really puts the E61 on top of the other PDAs.

Communication Features

This is an enterprise device, so communication features are all over the board - Blackberry email, Instant Messaging, IMAP4/POP3 email, presence, VPN, Push-to-Talk, SyncML, and of course SIP VoIP.

Browsing the web is a pleasure on the E61 and the impressive Series 60 3rd Edition browser, based on Safari's engine only makes things better. It doesn't re-organize content (only plain text on a given table cell it tries to fit on screen) and it features a fab mouse cursor (which can be controlled via the on-board 5-way joystick). This browser is fast and a joy to use. Actually it's faster than Opera 8.60 on the same phone and faster & more powerful than the older S60 browser.

Connectivity

The presense of WiFi is a very welcome one. Together with Bluetooth and IrDA it brings wireless short-range communications to the device. Its also got GPRS and EDGE connectivity for high-speed internet access. 3G/WCDMA/UMTS support is the icing on the cake.

The position of the IrDA port is a little strange. It is next to the pop-port at the bottom of the device - we'd have preferred to see this at the top for added convenience. Also the Bluetooth version is only v1.2 and doesn't support connecting stereo bluetooth headsets (A2DP). USB connectivity with the PC is also slow and is not recommended for large file transfers. Come on Nokia, USB 2.0 is available now!

Multimedia

The E61 is all about business and the phone doesn't sport a camera. This is a sensible decision given the size of the device but the presence of a video-call camera would have been great. (It's rumored that the E62i is on the cards and it has a 2.0MP camera!)

Apart from the camera, and the lack of a FM radio, the E61 is quite good in the Multimedia department. The Real Player supports 3gp, mp4, AAC, mp3, mid, amr, realaudio and WAV. The phone proved to be a good mp3 player too, either by using Real Player or its other, native mp3 player.

Other Features

The phone has 64MB of internal memory out of which 41MB can be used to store data. There's a miniSD slot for memory expansion and presently 2GB is the largest you can get. The card is not truly hot-swappable - you need to remove the battery cover to find the miniSD slot. A little fiddly and potentially annoying.

The E61 uses BP-5L 1500 mAh battery which, according to Nokia, provides up to 11 days of standby time. In practice, the phone should work two-three days with typical use.

Conclusion

Overall, this is actually a great device. The device wins the style stakes and is even more functional than the Blackberrys. It's light weight, reliable with good signal strength, boasts top notch call clarity and has one of the best keyboards on any phone. At around £250 for the sim free version, it really doesn't get any better!