About my decision
This phone was a natural upgrade path for me, having owned Nokia E60 and E51 before it.
For a very long time I was contemplating weather I need to upgrade from my E51 and if so, which one to choose the E71 or the E66. On one side I had the E71, with it's QWERTY keyboard, thinner body and huge battery. On the other I had the E66 with it's smaller size and accelerometer.
And since the most anoying feature in the E51 was the extreamly poor battery life (the E51 would some times not last throught a day of my typical use), I went for the E71 - even though I did not thing the QWERTY keyboard as an important feature.
To be honest I still contemplate getting the E66 also. Read below my thoughts on the phone: how does it compare, what software I find useful, etc.
So, how does it compare with the E51:
- Battery - great improvement. The claimed 400h standby time is very absurd. I'm able to get two days of usage.
- Screen - it's the same resolution as the E51, but slightly bigger.
- GPS - this is a real battery drainer. It's enough to have the fring location feature enabled and my battery is gone in about 6-8 hours. But not having to carry around the extra bluetooth GPS device is a great plus.
- Camera - I've never been a phone-camera lover. So I'm not impressed with the extra 1.2 megapixels. Having the flash is good, I guess. I would have honestly preffered to have the width of the phone rediced, and no camera.
- Reception - greatly reduced - read about this later
- OS (FR1) - small improvements. A bit saner menus. Standby screen is worse as far as I'm concerned.
- Second front camera... what would I use this for?
- Bundled software: quick office (I never use office documents); Advanced Call Manager (totally unstable) - so, understandably I'm not impressed.
BUGS
Well, what phone does not have those - probably the Motorola F3.
- Overall stability has been reduced.From time to time the phone would show perfect network coverage, but incoming calls would not ring and outgoing calls would fail - restarting the phone fixes this.
- Bluetooth paring problems - sometimes something goes wrong during the paring process. The phone would indicate it's connected,but in reality is not so. Other times the sould would not be audible neither from the phone, nor from the headset.
- Active standby screen - totally messed up, the e-mail plugins are tottaly messed up - the old version was much better, media player plugins disapears from time to time.
- Text input - this may be a bug in some applications, but from time to time it's impossible to type certain characters: the number shift would not have effect.
Essential E71 software
This is the software I use, which I've found to both be useful and stable.
Free software:
- fring - An all-in-one instant messanger. Works very well, the last two versions have proven to very stable.
- SEVEN Allways On Email - Push e-mail solution. Very stable! Perfectly integrated with the OS. It is comersial software. To be able to use it free register for the beta program, I've used it for quite some time with very little problems.
- Gizmo5 - It's the default VoIP provider on the E71. I'm very happy with their service.
- QIK - A must have live video streaming!
Comersial software:
Please note: I'm including this information with the hope it will be useful. I you like this software - buy it! It costs a lot of money to develop quality software, and we must give our support to those who have created software that is usefull.
- Garmin Mobile XT - leaves the competition far behind. I've tried TomTom6, Nokia Maps, and Google maps - Mobile XT is by far the best software. To install it.
That's all for now! Enjoy your phone!