The E71 is Making Me Rethink My Impending iPhone Purchase…
Posted on 26 May 2008, at 5:33 am, by Mitchell Oke
Last night I put my BlackJack II up for sale on eBay in anticipation of the 3G iPhone release. It sold just a few hours later, so I am all set for when it arrives in June (hopefully :P).
But this morning while perusing my usual tech news websites I saw a link to The Boy Genius to a review of Nokia’s revision of the E61, the E71. In 2006 I actually considered an E61 because of it’s large, gorgeous screen and spacious thumboard, but ultimately decided against it because it was so wide. This new model though looks absolutely fantastic!
I’ve been switching between the BlackJack II and the N95 8GB for the past two months, simply because the Nokia was faster, had better signal strength everywhere, and has an excellent 5 megapixel camera, a feature I have noticed myself using a lot more often these days. Oddly, my Exchange email seemed to work better and emails come through on the Nokia too.
The only thing that really kept me switching between the two (and why I bought the BlackJack II in the first place) was because of the thumboard. I am not a fan of T9, and while I am fairly good at it these days, I’m faster on the QWERTY. I’ve done a bit of typing on my iPod Touch to get the feel of what the iPhone is/would be like, and while it’s good, no matter how much Apple say it is, it’s not better than a proper thumboard.
And now enter this thing. Ultra slim, similar in size to the iPhone, but with a massive amount of available apps and a QWERTY keyboard! My contact and Nokia says it will be out Q3 2008, not too long to wait. My decision has been made a lot harder…
May 26th, 2008 at 5:47 am
Mitchell,
The E71 seems similar in size to the Blackjack II — so I’m not sure that’s the only reason for a switch.
What’s in the E71 that makes it more desirable than the Blackjack II?
If I recall you only had the Blackjack II for a few months. What was wrong with it?
May 26th, 2008 at 5:53 am
Yes I did buy the BJII only two months ago, but a few things have bugged me about it after the “new phone” feeling wore off.
I found the BlackJack II too have a rather poor radio, it’s signal strength was always pathetic. Worse than that, often when it would lose signal it would not reconnect to the network properly, therefore calls, messages and emails didn’t come through. Rebooting the phone at least once a day because the signal wouldn’t be detected or the data connection wouldn’t connect even with signal bars showing was a major PITA.
It was also a bit sluggish, and with the speed I typed it would often miss keys. Ask Judie, she will tell you a lot of convos we had where I was using the BJII had quite a few missing letters
The camera was rubbish, which really annoyed me after using the Sony Ericsson P1i, followed by the N95 then the N95 8GB. All these had great autofocus cameras. The one on the BJII is garbage.
I’m pretty sure I have mentioned to Judie once or twice how much I liked the N95 8GB, and how it would be even better with a keyboard. It seems Nokia was eavesdropping
May 26th, 2008 at 5:56 am
Oh Yeah Baby!! Give me that E71! WM6 is so klutzy compared to the S60.. I just got a friend of mine an HTC Touch Dual and she hated it! She flew right to the Nokia E51 and is literally purring about it.. I’m riding the Nokia N95-3 NAM and switching it with the Nokia 8800 Arte. But that E71.. Hmm.. Good!
May 26th, 2008 at 6:05 am
And I love my N95 8GB! Nokia’s getting some stuff pretty right these days.
May 26th, 2008 at 8:17 am
Hmmm… iPhone’s real nice, and with the 3G version coming soon should be a hit. But then again, to each his own. The iPhone, in my opinion, is actually overrated. Though it’s got some nice little tidbits like multi-touch and the accelerometer, it can’t do some simple stuff! Like forwarding messages and deleting individual SMS’s! Heck, I’ve been a Mac guy for 6 years, and I’m sure my gear (16GB iPhone, 80GB iPod Classic, 2.5GHz new MacBook pro, 3.06GHz iMac) would agree with me. The iPhone’s nice, and it’s Apple, which I like, but… I mean… it’s a fancy iPod that can make calls and text. It’s NOT a great phone, in my opinion anyways. And really, Steve Jobs is good at covering up. You know how he said the iPhone runs OS ten? It does. It runs OSX, v1.0. Not the desktop Mac OS X, it’s just OSX. He DID say OSX, actually. But enough of my rambling.
May 26th, 2008 at 8:27 am
Nokia is making some interesting products lately, but the E71 doesn’t appeal to me at all because of it’s low-res (320 by 240) screen. Same problem I have tih the N95. I refuse to every buy another device with this low a resolution. They make up for it a bit by offering a decent color depth, but that low-res screen is such a negative for me.
Also, I haven’t found anything that indicates what CPU/speed this thing has yet, of course the N95 gets by with a pretty slow processor (only 332MHz), so maybe that wouldn’t be so bad.
The BGR report put up their review after only one day with the device so I suspect the honeymoon period wasn’t over yet. I’ll definitley be watching for other reviews!
May 26th, 2008 at 8:30 am
That’s a good point Chris. I have asked my Nokia contact to send me one when she has them available, hopefully soon!
Yeah I’m not sure what the speed of the N95 processor is, but I have never had any performance issues with it.
May 26th, 2008 at 9:15 am
The N95 runs on a 332MHz processor, if I’ve got my info correct, which would be very slow in a WM device, but is generally considered to operate pretty well in Symbian devices. The OS definitely DOES make a difference here.
The 128MB RAM also helps the situation significantly.
The thing with the iPhone is that it runs with a 320 by 480 screen (HVGA), 128MB RAM and a 600MHz processor, so it’s underlying hardware specs are good regardless of ones opinion of the OS on top. I’d like to see VGA, but, in general, I’d like to see all the manufacturers step up to better RAM and processor speed specs.
May 26th, 2008 at 5:27 pm
i`ve been waiting so much for the 3G iPhone.. and now this comes in.. i hate cell phone market.
i am so happy with my E51 and i think that if the E71 will have the same keyboard as it looks from the pics, it`s gonna blow all the wm6 competition away..
May 26th, 2008 at 7:20 pm
@raymond_u: Give the iphone a little credit. For a rev 1 device (remember this is the FIRST release of the O/S) - it ain’t bad.
My Blackberry (which I just abandoned for the iPhone) STILL couldn’t do html email (without a sw add-on) and the browser stunk. Two area’s where the iPhone blows Blackberry right out of the water.
I was actually quite surprised to read in BusinessWeek that when they reviewer saw the Blackberry 9000 that the browser wasn’t improved. An improved browser is rumored but so far unseen on the next BB release.
IMHO, if Blackberry can’t match the iPhone’s Safari browser they can expect to start experiencing sales declines.
In case anyone missed it , my 10 reasons for kicking Blackberry to the curve and switching full time to iPhone are here:
http://www.geardiary.com/2008/.....ns-i-left/
May 26th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Wayne, I have a similar problem with Windows Mobile, it’s browser just sucks. Using Opera Mini isn’t a perfect solution either since Microsoft’s Java implementation is poor.
Both of things are very good on Series 60v3. The built-in browser is excellent and fast, and Java apps integrate just like native S60 ones.
May 28th, 2008 at 3:17 am
@Mitchell: True. I’ve an E61i. Its wide but since I’ve got wide hands, it feels ok for me. You wont believe, that even though I’m a die hard WM fan, but I still admit that out-of-box experience of any WM device has not been as great as E61i. I literally haven’t added a single application to it. Everything single useful app is built-in already! from voice controls to speech sms to the great S60v3 broswer
Go for E71 ASA it is released!