My latest attempt at finding the perfect business phone comes to an end. I have upgraded my Orange Business mobile contract to the Nokia E71 and what a beauty it is. Read on for my review.

The Device

You really have to hold one of these to appreciate the thin and well built beauty it is. Then look at the massive BP-4L battery it contains that takes up what must be 70% of the internal volume and wonder how Nokia designed such a thing. Finished in Stainless Steel with a low res but very bright transflective screen and neat detailing like the fine mesh grills over the speakers it really looks the part. The back is a fingerprint magnet but you won't care. It has little rubber plugs over the USB and SD ports which I am always sceptical of. But given the 2GB card included and the ability to sync everything you need over the network or WiFi I don't expect to be using them much.

Battery life

Usually a sticking point and the reason I don't have an iPhone or HTC Diamond. The huge battery in this (the same one fitted to the E90) keeps it going for my average usage (Bluetooth on, syncing to Exchange every 15 minutes, occasional GPS and WIFI use and medium levels of phone calls) for about 3 to 4 days. Compared to the HTC or the iPhone that would barely make a working day for me. I would say the battery life is not an issue on this device.

Symbian

I hear plenty of people moaning about Symbian, for me I have to say it is one of the most solid mobile phone OS's out there at the moment. Not as glossy as the iPhone or newer releases of Windows Mobile. But it is functional and efficient. The E71 comes with Series 60 v3 Feature Pack 1 and gone are the slight delays on previous releases. This is fast...very fast. The improvements to the calendar app are appreciated. The browser is however not quite up to the iPhone standard or Opera which is available on other devices. It works well enough for most sites though.

GPS

Like the E90 the E71 has assisted GPS which seems to be accurate outside and get a very fast lock. The built in Maps/Navigation suite is functional enough and the phone comes with a 2GB microSD card loaded with the UK/Ireland maps. The phone comes with 90 days of subscription to the paid for navigation component. Extensions are a reasonably hefty £50 a year which to my mind seems expensive. £30 would be far more reasonable and not having me consider reaching for the trusty TomTom when it expires. Of course if you don't need navigation then you can also install the free Google Maps for Mobile which works well. My phone came with the default access point for the map search and traffic info miss-configured to Orange MMS but a quick dive into the menu resolved that. It would be helpful if the phone indicated that was the issue rather than just not returning any search results.

Keyboard

It looks small and it is..The buttons are tiny. However in use it is more bearable than you would think and probably as easy to type on as an E90. The keys are smaller but the raised profile helps you hit the right one if you go for the two thumb approach to typing. Layout is sane with frequent characters like @ or ? Brought out as single keys. Other characters are behind a menu accessed via a dedicated Character key. Number dialling from this keypad is a little awkward for things like button access to voicemail services. But it works well enough as long as you keep frequent contacts saved. It also has an active backlight that comes on in the dark. The keyboard is as good in use as on the Treo or Blackberry devices I would say. There is a predictive text style feature which works quite well but I still find life easier with it turned off.

Phone features

Call quality is easily on par with other Nokia devices and therefore excellent. The speaker phone is loud and clear. The vibrate function missing from the E90 is present although a little faint. Importantly an incoming call doesn't seem to kick you out of applications with unsaved changes like on my old SPV M3100. Even when in sat nav mode I was returned neatly to the map when my call ended.

Mail for Exchange

This is the primary reason I have a S60 phone. Mail for Exchange works well and in fact better than the Exchange Access built into the Windows Mobile Phones. Still it has the issue of missing access to public folders or even sub folders of your Inbox which is annoying if you have rules moving messages into them at the office. But this limitation is also present on the Windows Mobile devices so it may be a “feature” of the Exchange Mobile Access component. Either way I wish it would get fixed. Mail, Contacts, Tasks and Calendar are all synced to a Exchange Server with the necessary support configured and generally it just works, Crucially your sysadmin can wipe this data, lock the phone and change the pin code if you lose it.

WiFi

I must say I haven't used this much, but so far it has managed to find and connect to any access point I have tried. There is a reported issue with hidden SSID's but thus far I haven't encountered it.

Camera

The camera is an 3.2MP Autofocus Camera with Flash. It isn't as good as some dedicated camera phones but it doesn't embarrass itself either. Missing is the ability to down the compression on the output jepgs which I think would resolve the outstanding quality issues. It has an excellent auto Macro mode which works really well. Also included is the ability to OCR text, barcodes and automatically import photographed Business Cards into Contacts (the latter two are actually more hassle than they are worth but it is a neat gimmick) There is also a front facing low res camera for Video calls, does anybody actually use these ? I tried it once on my HTC in a rare circumstance when the other party also had a 3G signal (we were in the same pub) and after the “yay it works” moment we lost interest.

Games

None..not one...not any whatsoever. There are some mediocre free ones for S60 which are generally very low quality or hideously overpriced commercial ones. But this is a business phone right ?

It does have a nice collection of Media Apps including Real Player, Flash Player and an FM radio (the included Nokia earpiece is required for this to work)

Business Apps

With QuickOffice,Mobile Presenter, Adobe PDF and a zip utility you will probably be able to review any attachments you get. QuickOffice falls over on Office 2007 files but you should have already killed anyone sending you .docx files. There is also a utility to configure Bluetooth, Infra-red or Network printers. But it is lacking any useful profiles and not many of the applications seem to support printing anyway. So far I have only managed to print something from the Web Browser.

Conlusions

Despite a few small niggles I would say this is easily Nokia's best effort on the E series to date. I loved the functionality of the E90 I borrowed from a client but ultimately it is just too large for everyday use. The E71 sits in your pocket as easily as just about any other phone yet does everything as well as the E90. The size drop from the E61 gets it just about right. Unlike the Windows Mobile devices it works really well as a phone with usable battery life. The speed bump S60 seems to have gotten with Feature Pack 1 is very welcome and really apart from starting the Maps application you will very rarely find yourself waiting for this phone.