The E series from Nokia has been always dedicated to business people. E71 is a successor of E61, borrowing quite a lot from it. However, Nokia E71 looks much better and is slightly thinner. Now it is much easier to keep it in your pocket, and it is more beautiful and more powerful. It is a smartphone for business people and it is very much appreciated. We will see that in this Nokia E71 review.
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Nokia E71 measures 114 mm in length, 57 mm in width and it is only 10 mm thick. It weights 127 grams, like most smartphones do. Because the phone is very small, its weight gives you the impression that the phone is very compact and solid.
E71 has a stainless steel and plastic case. The metal makes it look very good and gives the feeling of a solid phone. It is available in two colors, black and white.
On the top side of the phone, we have the ambient light sensor, and on its right, we have the video calls camera. A half of the phone's front side, is occupied by the 2.36 inch screen, followed by the navigation keys and a full QWERTY keyboard. Very well located and useful are the shortcut buttons because, with a push you make your way to the contacts, calendar and the email menus. The microphone is on the front side too. It has an unusual location, because usually it is near the Charger plug. On the left side, we have the microSD card slot and the microUSB port. The two slots are covered with plastic lids to prevent dirt and dust. I am surprised to see that the phone still has infrared port, because only few phones still have it. On the right side, we have the 3.5 mm jack for the audio headphones found in the package box and, slightly below, we find the volume control keys. Among them, we find the voice command button. On the bottom side, we find the charger plug and the hand strap slot.
The backside looks very good. It is made from high quality stainless steel. It looks perfect until the fingerprints make their appearance. Above the battery cover, the phone has a 3.2 megapixel camera and a flash with LED technology. In addition, we have a mini-mirror, which helps you do your portrait pictures easier.
Nokia E71 works with Symbian S60 technology. This platform gives us stability. To demonstrate that it is a business phone, it has quick access keys that help you browse very quickly through the menus and access some applications with a single button. One of these keys is Home, which takes you back into the background, no matter the menu in which you are. Although simple, this function is very useful when you have many applications running and you quickly want to pass them in the background. As I said before, in this category of direct access keys we include the email, the calendar and the timetable.
Nokia E71 has a 2.36-inch QVGA screen, which offers 16 million colors and a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels. The screen is slightly smaller than E61's screen, but the phone looks much more compact. The image offered by the screen has a good quality, even under bright sunlight, and you can easily read the information displayed. The screen has an excellent contrast and vivid colors.
Although E71 is a business phone, the multimedia functions are very good. The music player is the standard player used by Symbian and I think it is good enough. It can sort tracks by artist, album, genre and composer. After you add music using the USB cable, the Bluetooth or the memory card, the player automatically scans new files and adds them to your album. The player comes with five equalizer presets, but you can modify them afterwards. Nokia E71 has Bluetooth and A2DP support, meaning you can listen to stereo music on wireless headphones.
The sound quality is good. We used both the standard headphones, and some other pairs and I was happy about the sound quality. It is still a phone, so it cannot be compared to a powerful player, but if you occasionally listen to music then the audio player is very good. The sound is clear, but the volume is not that good, so if you are in a noisy area you will not be able to concentrate on the music.
The camera has 3.2-megapixels and a LED flash. The lenses are not protected by plastic. As time passes, it is possible that the lens will scratch and the pictures will come out worse. The second problem is that we do not have a dedicated camera button. These two issues clearly show that Nokia has thought from the beginning that we will take photos with E71 only occasionally. The picture quality is average. The colors are not too real. The video recording does not manage to impress. With only 15 fps, you cannot make a decent video. The video player is the well-known Real Player. How the phone's screen is already horizontally, the player works only in landscape mode.
The FM radio is good if you get bored of your own music and want to listen to something new. It can automatically scan and save channels in your area. If you access the Internet, the Visual Radio application can download all the local stations and save them in your phone. This is a old version and it does not have RDS. I was not bothered by that.
Nokia E71 is very rich in the connectivity chapter. It even has infrared technology and it can be useful if you want to transfer something to an older phone that does not have Bluetooth. Of course, the Bluetooth is not missing.
For the Internet, we have WiFi and HSDPA. Therefore, you will have better transfer speeds in your operator network, and in hotspot areas. It is a pleasure to surf on the Internet with Nokia E71's web browser. The fact that the screen is already placed horizontally makes the pages fit better and it does not need so much horizontal scrolling. The pages load quickly and are rendered well. As you already know, the Symbian browser is very good, so I did not felt the need to install anything, although there are alternatives like Opera Mobile for example.
Because it is a business phone, I was mainly interested in what applications the phone has for time management. Nokia E71 comes with one of the best organizers any phone has released so far. It is easy to use and highly functional. Dates can be displayed in four ways (in days, weeks, months and to-do lists). You can add more types of events such as meetings, memos, birthdays, etc.
The Office applications are not missing. All Nokia Symbian phones come with QuickOffice, which lets you view Word, Excel or Powerpoint files. Nokia has a better version of QuickOffice on E71, and you have the possibility to modify the documents. This version must be paid on other Symbian phones. E71 can read PDFs too, and it even has a ZIP extractor application.
Nokia E71 has a built-in GPS. With the big horizontal screen, it might be very good to use it for navigation and you will not need to spend money on a dedicated GPS. For navigation, E71 comes with Nokia Maps. The maps are good, but if you want to have voice commands, you will have to pay for each country.
From this Nokia E71 review we found out that it is one of the best equipped Nokia smartphones. No wonder it became so popular. It moves well, it looks good, it has a more than reasonable size and it offers an excellent connectivity.