obsidial | blog

If you read one of my previous reviews, I mentioned that one item that really bothered me about the E71 was the reception.  The first E71 I had was a pretty early model (thanks to the fine folks at WOMWorld) and it indeed has some issues.  NOW, I’ve gotten my hands on a later batch E71 (this time thanks to the fine folks at S60.com) and I have to say that this specimen has MUCH better reception than the old device, in fact I’d say it is JUST as good as my benchmark N95 8GB. In doing some research over at HowardForums, it is beleived that it was an early batch of these devices that suffered from strange GSM/3G signal fluctuations and such, and devices with later build dates fare much better.

To check the build date of your device, look at the sticker on the box.  The build date on mine is the 37/2008 which I believe refers to the week in which it was built:

So if you are buying one on eBay,etc. or even walking into a store to pick one up, look for one of these later builds, they may cause you far less trouble.

I recently had a conversation with a friend of mine about how I thought it was an excellent idea that Motorola is trying to go full-bore into the Android abyss.  Today I find an article on Mobile Industry Review that fits this converstation I had pretty well.

The Best Thing that Motorola could do is go fully Android.

Take a look at that article and join the discussion there.  I’m in the camp that sees Motorola as a great American company who has lost their way in recent years.  I would love to see them back in the game.  Like the author of the story above, I too went the StarTac -> RAZR route and loved Motorola design back then.  I moved to smartphones from HTC and Nokia and haven’t looked at a Moto in years…maybe, hopefully, Motorola will give me reason to once again.

I was going to write a piece talking about the new build E71 that I received, but the arrival of the Android G1 and it’s comparisons to the iPhone and others got me thinking.  Below is a mini rant that I came up with on the issues and my thoughts on where Nokia/S60 should be headed. Note: I was also influenced by a post on Thoughts on S60 about this very same issue. Thanks.

The more I use the Nokia E71 (in fact, I’m writing this post on one…really), the more I think that Nokia really needs to add one more product to it’s already large inventory: a device that is a no-compromise combination of E71 and N95. See, I have a N95 sitting here also, and I have real fits sometimes wondering which one to take with me.  Do I take the N95 in case I’m out with my wife and my 18 month old son and want to capture a ‘precious’ moment with its 5MP camera? Or do I take the E71 because it has the oh-so-useful qwerty keyboard, it’s not a brick in my pocket like the N95 and it’s just so damn beautiful?  What if I had the situation that I had yesterday, where my brother-in-law sent me a few MMS of his hour old daughter and I want to show them to my mother-in-law on her TV screen? I actually went outside to my car, grabbed my N95 and A/V cable to do this (good thing I had it with me) what am I saying, it’s a slow day when I only have two Nokia S60 devices with me J.

I know that the idea of the E-series is 80 percent work/20 percent play, but as more and more features keep getting added to these devices, software and developers get better and better, and more importantly prices for unlocked devices stay high, we users demand more.  For the prices we pay in the US for S60 devices, we need to be able to do everything with them.  Couple all this with current economic conditions, and many people will be hard pressed to afford a work device and a play device, they’ll need to combine out of sheer necessity.  There’s a reason the iPhone is doing so well…it does just that.  It combines enough of a business device with the traditional iPod that people overlook its glaring omissions such as video recording, lack of MMS support, A2DP and the much maligned copy and paste.   To Nokia’s credit, I have all of these features and more in this E71, but you don’t see people camped outside of the Nokia store in Chicago to get one.  The reason is NOT because the iPhone is an Apple product, Apple has flops too (do you know anyone who has an Apple TV?), it’s because Apple has marketed and made the device into the ‘cell phone for people who hate their cell phone’, the same way they made the Macintosh into the computer ‘for the rest of us’ and the iPod into the MP3 player that normal people could actually get music onto.  Apple products are not the most feature rich out there, but what functions they do serve, they perform them perfectly. 

Now, bringing this back to Nokia and S60, where does this leave us fans of Finnish design,

unlocked devices and S60? Frankly, S60 needs two things that both the iPhone and Google’s Android have today: a good way of getting exciting applications onto the device, and the most important feature…genuine man-in-the-streets buzz for the devices.  That first part needs to be driven by the second, so let me start there.  Why do people like the G1?  It’s not its looks (can we say “2002 design”?) or features, the N95 destroys it in that aspect, just as it does most other devices…it’s Google, it’s the “Google-ness” of the device, the idea that you will have your Gmail, Google Apps and search all in one place .  Why do people like the iPhone? It’s not that it’s an Apple product (remember what I said about the Apple TV?) it’s the similarity to the other phenomenally successful Apple product, the iPod and the “Wow” factor of the interface. 

Presently, at least in the US, Nokia has no similar “buzz factor”.  Sure the E71 is getting good reviews, but besides nut-balls such as me (and probably you if you have actually read this far), who actually CARE about this stuff, few people are buying them here.  Nokia badly needs to produce an ICONIC device for US consumption, attach it to a carrier (just a fact of life in the backwards US market…again, look at iPhone and G1, both tied to carriers, who control the market here not the other way around like Nokia likes it) and market, market, market that device.  Maybe that device is the 5800 ExpressMusic, maybe it’s something else…but I’ll tell you what it CAN’T be surprisingly, the N96 (or N85 for that matter).  There was a time when the N96’s features alone could sell it to US consumers, but that time has come and gone. 

Tomorrow’s Nokia needs to be a full keyboard touch screen device as is all the rage today.  It needs to have expandability, however not in the traditional extra battery and MicroSD card slot kind of way, but in software.  You have to be able to easily grab applications that expand the user’s experience, not hardware that clips on the back or inside the phone.  Sorry to say, but hardware expansion, regardless of whether it’s a larger battery, or more storage is the realm of nerds, and nerds do not drive the market.  People may question that S60 is long in the tooth and cannot wow people like it needs to, but I’ll leave that discussion to the programmers, what I will say is that if Nokia WANTS to compete with the newcomers, it will find a way to tackle any OS or UI issues that crop up. 

Seriously, I think they HAVE to.

In part one of my review, I talked mostly about my first impressions and the build quality of the Nokia E71…in case you missed it, check it out HERE.  This time, I want to talk about basic phone functions as well as the things that make the E71 unique and possibly worth your money.

The Physical

The E71 of course, sports a full QWERTY keyboard, but just as the E71 is much smaller than it’s predecessor, the E61, the keyboard is also a bit more cramped than previous owners may be used to. Compared to the BlackJack II’s keyboard, you’ll see it is much more compact, however perhaps that is not a bad thing…I found no trouble typing on the E71, but your mileage may vary.

Nokia has seen fit to also move some of the keys around in (I think) an attempt to be more like Windows Mobile. The S60 menu key has been replaced by the Home icon, and the pencil key is now gone.  The removal on the pencil key took some getting used to and led me to a quick Google search to find out how to do this: you actually just hold the Shift key and use the d-pad to select…Copy comes up as a choice on the screen as long as you hold down Shift.

Size is also a very big plus on the E71, it’s pretty much the thinnest S60 device out there and this is very clear when looking at it versus the Samsung BlackJack II, another thin-ish QWERTY device.  I won’t even embarrass the N95 by placing it next to the E71.

Reception

Now,  this was a big one for me…and a big problem.  I’ve seen reports on the Internet both good and bad about the E71, some saying it’s a 3G network issue, some saying it is bad AT&T coverage.  I however found what I would call a combination of bad antenna placement and an all metal case that made me keep the E71 on the sidelines much more than I thought I would.  It seems that the antenna for the E71 is in the bottom “chin” area below the keyboard.  I gathered this by searching some forums as well as empirical evidence:  I simply held the bottom of the phone between my thumb and forefinger, and could watch the signal bars go from full signal to none in about 10 seconds or so.  I released the phone from my grip and signal came right back.  I could duplicate this time and time again. Perhaps I got a bad unit, I certainly hope so…I always recommend Nokia devices for their reception, and I really want this issue to be fixed.

I suppose that a solution to this would be to not hold the phone in such a way as to obscure the antenna, but I feel like I shouldn’t have to.  I don’t remember this kind of trouble with any other device I have owned.  My other problem with the reception/RF qualities of the device is that it emits almost four times the radiated energy of my other device, the N95. Check out http://sar.nokia.com/sar/index.jsp for the info.  Frankly, I haven’t bothered looking at SAR readings for a while, but when one phone (N95) emits 0.41 W/kg when at your ear and the other (E71) emits 1.40 W/kg….I know which one I’m choosing.

Camera

This is my other issue with this phone.  I’m not of the opinion that the camera should be on par with the N95’s 5 megapixel monster, this is after all a business phone first and foremost, 3.2 megapixels is very good for this class of device… however…I should be able to easily take pictures with the camera.  All of the spec sheets claim that the E71 has autofocus, but hand the phone to someone, even someone who has used Nokia S60 devices before…like say me, who has been using E and N series phones for a couple of years now and have them figure out how to auto-focus.  On the N95, you press the camera button half way and it focuses.  The E71 having no dedicated camera button, has a much less intuitive method for autofocus, you launch the camera app, and press the ‘T’ button to focus, and then press the center of the d-pad to take the picture.  I suppose I’m making a bigger deal out of this than I should, but I just think maybe a “press T to focus” overlay on the screen would go a long way to fix this issue.

Messaging, Contacts and Calendar

This is what the E71 is made for, and for me it is what makes this a device I desperately want to purchase.  Personally, I use a free application from Nokia called MailForExchange, which allows Exchange ActiveSync to my company’s Microsoft Exchange server.  I have used this functionality on the E50 and the N95 for a couple of years now and it works great.  Within a few minutes of powering on the device, I had entered my credentials and had all of my contacts, email and calendar items synced over the air to my E71. The only downside to the E71 is that it does not do HTML mail.  I know that other devices either have that feature or soon will, so I hope the S60 team has this on their “To Do” lists.

Stay tuned for “Part III” as I dive into the mutimedia functions and my conclusions.

Nokia officially launched a few handsets this morning, the N96, N79 and N85.  Check them all out over at nseries.com or at www.symbian-guru.com, Ricky always has the inside track

The one that caught my eye however was the N85.  At least so far…I was looking thru the specs, and noticed that it has an OLED display, quad-band HSDPA support (yes…it works on both US and Euro frequncies) and (FINALLY) MicroUSB charging.

It’s early here, and I’m not up for typing 10,000 words, but the other thing to look out for is the new applicaton previewed called “LifeviNE“, which seems to be a kind of take the Sports out of SportsTracker, but leaves the rest in, meaning, it’s more tracks your location, geotags your pictures, video etc. and lets you share that with friends.  There is possible much more to this application,  and it’s currently just in alpha, so hopefully we hear more about it soo,

Ok…now that I’ve had the opportunity to get my hands on a Nokia E71-2 (thanks WOM World) I officially have a wish.  Please…please…please Nokia, take the build quality lessons from the E-Series and apply them to the N-Series. 

Build Quality

I want to start here, because frankly, this is the first thing you notice when you unbox the E71.  It is probably the most solid feeling device I have used, more solid in fact than the phone everyone compares themselves to.  I kind of find that amazing because the E71 actually has a removable battery, and a physical keyboard unlike the iPhone, and therefore you’d think it may lend itself to some issues…but remember, this is an E-Series device, and Nokia tends to take a special interest in making the E-Series very solidly built devices.  Just as Charles on the S60.com blogs noted that the E66 (the other E-Series released the same time as the E71) reminded him of an S60-enabled version of the Nokia 8800, the E71 reminds me of this line as well.  It simply seems to be a much more expensive device than it actually is. Speaking of price vs. quality…I have one gripe for Nokia:  Why does my “flagship” (and more expensive,mind you) N95 8GB feel like a toy compared to this?

Simply put, the E71 slides nicely into your pocket, comes with a great leather case and lanyard, and makes you feel like you are carrying a quality piece of technology.

Having gushed about the E71 so far, stay tuned as I put the E71 thru it’s paces and test out how it performs during my daily workflow.  I’ll be concentrating on email, music, GPS and the ups and downs of the full front facing qwerty S60 experience.

I’m working on other things (like a Nokia E71 review) but I saw this and couldn’t pass up the opportunity to kick Motorola while they are down.

Sprint is releasing a “new” RAZR, called the VE20.  It’s supposedly a lower cost option to the RAZR2.  I’m sorry Motorola, please, please, please….let the RAZR die already !!!! It was great when it came out, but the design is a has-been, the specs suck, and the world does not need a “lower cost” RAZR, they are nearly free with a box of cereal now !

This is absolute proof that Motorola JUST DOES NOT GET IT.

Carbon Fiber, titanium, polished glass, stainless steel….and still not-quad-band.  This phone makes me want to move to Europe.

8800 Carbon Arte.

Ever since I saw the 8800 series on AT&T TDMA years ago, I’ve wanted one.  Nokia has seen fit to NOT upgrade anything since the original 8800 model for the North American market (the 8801).  We did not get the Sirrocco, and we aren’t getting the 8800 Arte series either. 

Just a side note Nokia: how come it’s only your luxury phones that you see fit to include a charging cradle.  Almost every phone from years ago had one at least available for purchase.  I bought a N95-4….you know what would be nice? If I could put this $750 “mobile computer” on a charging stand at night….that’s what !!!

While everyone is looking toward 4G, I’m still waiting for my local towers to get AT&T 3G!!!

I guess I have enough time to move the family off of AT&T if Verizon will get LTE pushed out as quickly as they claim.

link from GigaOM

But…on the other hand maybe Verizon will have a much harder time doing this than we think.  Up to this point, they have had the relatively easy task of upgrading from CDMA 1xRTT to EDVO to EVDO Rev A. but we’ll see how this all shakes out in the months and years ahead.  They’ve got lots of money and smart people over there at VZW.