1. E71 First Impressions

The good:

• It is a slim, light (by smartphone standards), sexy phone
  
• The battery life is reasonable, much better than a TyTN or Treo, but not as good as a blackberry
  
• The functionality of Nokia Maps (GPS) is very good considering the price (Free)

The bad:

• I had a continual looping re-install problem with required fixing with a file editor
  
• SMS application is terrible
  
• E-mail application is worse than terrible
  
• Keyboard size and spacing is awkward, more on the layout below
  
• No timed on/off feature
  
• General lack of keyboard shortcuts (scrolling hell)
  
• Signed apps issues

2. E71 Keyboard

This is the E71's keyboard:



Compare it to a Blackberry, Treo 650 and HTC TyTn:







There are some critical errors with the keyboard and the layout:

• The 'Z' row is shifted to the left by 1 space. The other 3 keyboards manage to get 'Z' under 'S' rather than 'A'. This gives rise to typing errors, but I guess after a while you could get used to it.
  
• The '0' key is not underneath the '8' key. Again this is something all the other keyboards get right.
  
  
• Every other keyboard here makes maximum use of keys by putting a symbol on every key possible. Nokia wastes the block of 9 keys on the left and 3 keys on the right.
  
  If they had done this, they would have no need to have a page 2 on their symbol key.
  
  It takes 7-8 keypresses to get a '(' and ')' symbol.
  
  
• The contrast between number keys and non-number keys is less than all other keyboards here.

One thing Nokia did get right was to put a lot of individual punctuation keys. The 5 buttons under K, L and C are dedicated to punctuation making typing easier.

The raised bump on the number 5 key, while isn't very prominent, is better than the other keyboards and you can actually use it to find the key if you have your eyes closed.

Auto-correction

The E71 has predictive text and auto-correction. This feature is terrible, bad suggestions are made which overwrite your good words and some words are auto-corrected to random words.

A more conservative approach e.g. as employed by the Blackberry which only inserts apostrophes in words such as "I'm" and "Can't" and capitalise at the start of sentences would be useful.

Since this is not possible, I have predictive text and auto-correction turned off, which is a shame.

2. No touch-screen, no scroll-wheel

A touch-screen can cover a multitude of UI sins. The E71 does not have a touch screen and the designers did not take this into consideration when designing the UI for many of the applications.

In calendar, to go to a certain date, you press options, then press the down key 3 times, then press the select key before typing in your date.

On a Blackberry, you type 'g' to go to date, or alternatively, you can scroll there very quickly by using the scroll-wheel and an accelerator key to jump by month/week.

I'm mention only the calendar, but almost every application suffers from this. For example, to reply to a text message you need to press: option, select reply, select via text message. Three buttons to do the most basic task when handling an SMS!

Very often, you the E71, you find yourself in scroll menu hell. Options are given in a long menu where only part of the options are visible on the screen at a time. There are no shortcut keys to skip to a given menu item and you are forced to scroll by pressing the up/down keys multiple times. There's not even a scroll-wheel to take away some of this pain.

3. Email application is useless

The in-built email client is useless. It cannot automatically download full messages, meaning that when headers are downloaded, you need to wait to download the remainder of the messages.

I could go on about the uselessness of the email application, but I found a 3rd party alternative which is at least useable.

4. Major Date Bug

The E71 does not advance the date from Saturday to Sunday. For some reason, every Sunday morning, the date will show as Saturday. This means no alarms will sound and no appointment reminders will be made.

Also, it will screw up your SMS inbox order since it sorts the messages by arrival date.

There appears to be no acknowledgement of the bug and no fix on the horizon.

5. To be continued

This review will continue in a separate posting, in the meantime, if you found this review useful, please feel free to donate. Hey, it's worth a try!

Update: Nokia E71 Faults lists another critical fault with the mic/sound.