Nokia E71 review: Messenger of steel

E-series: connecting people like no other

With the shameful camera performance behind us, it's time to check out the connectivity options. This is a great chance for the messenger to repair its damaged reputation.

And well, it truly is on fire when data transfers are in question. E71 has it all: from the outdated Infrared through Bluetooth v2.0 and USB v2.0 to Wi-Fi and 3G. Furthermore, the 3G comes with HSDPA support for the fastest network data transfers.

A hot-swappable card slot is also on board. It might just be the quickest way of transferring data and quite convenient too.

We give an excellent mark to Nokia E71 on connectivity, just because we know no better.

Web browser

Browsing the internet on a Nokia smartphone is a pleasure. Now, with the E71 and its landscape screen it's all the better. Reading is much more convenient in landscape mode and, thanks to the great page rendering, content fits perfectly on screen and looks exactly like on a PC.

The virtual mouse cursor takes browsing another level up. It is easy to control and generally works great. A mini-map can be activated to help navigating your way around large sites where lots of scrolling is required. The zoom level is also easily adjustable at the expense of only a few key presses. The web browser also offers fullscreen view mode.

The web browser is really good

The large amount of RAM is another thing that improves the browser performance. The web browser is one of the most RAM-hungry applications. With the E71 you are extremely unlikely to run out of RAM even if you load very heavy web pages and have a few applications running in the background. The ample 2.36" display is another welcome boost to browsing.

The final touches to the Nokia E71 browser are the built-in full Java and Flash support . Having surfed quite frequently for the past week, we didn't manage to stumble upon any flash content the E71 was unable to handle.

Flash video is also not a problem for the E71 web browser - you can watch video on the full-featured versions of YouTube and the likes.

Organizer

Time-management is another business phone virtue. Little wonder, Nokia E71 has one of the most elaborate organizer packages we've seen. There are a lot of nice applications, all very user-friendly and functional.

The trip starts with the calendar. It has four different types of view - to-do, weekly, daily and agenda as well as four types of events available for setting up - Meeting, Memo, Anniversary and To-do. The agenda view modes is new to Nokia handsets and is really nice - it allows the dates of the month and the events for the selected day to appear simultaneously on the screen. Every event has its own unique fields, some of which allow an alarm to be activated at a preset time to act as a reminder.

The calendar view modes and the events available for setting up

Mobile office is also duly covered, with seamless handling of Word, Excel and Powerpoint files. Furthermore, unlike most other Nokia handsets out there, editing documents is supported right out of the box. With Nokia E71 you won't need to pay extra for editing your office documents.

There is still a number of updates for the Quickoffice that come for a price but most users can do just fine without them. The ones that use MS Office 2007 documents however won't be so lucky as the support for those doesn't come included and they will have to purchase the next version of the application.

Editing a doc and an xls file with the built-in Quickoffice

A PDF reader is also part of the Nokia E71 preinstalled content and a ZIP manager allows extracting archived files straight from your phone.

The PDF reader is also here

The other pre-bundled organizing and time-management applications are: a great unit converter, calculator and voice recorder, as well as the Notes application. We are not going to get into detail with them, as their functionality and performance are familiar enough. The ActiveNotes application is also on board allowing multimedia content to be added to your notes.

The calculator, converter and ActiveNotes applications

The Nokia E71 alarm clock application is also very nice. It allows a huge number of alarms to be set, each with its own name, set-off time and repeat pattern.

The alarm clock gives a lot of room for customization

Thanks to the wireless presenter you can handle presentations straight from your phone.

The wireless presenter app interface and settings

The printer application enables printing content straight from your Nokia E71.

You don't need a computer to pair your E71 with a printer

There is also a scanning application, which uses the camera to scan business cards or text. It doesn't do too well though, failing to recognize most of the words correctly.

The scanner application failed to impress us

The Sports tracker application allows you to keep track of you recent workouts and follow your improvement in time.

The sports tracker might come in handy for users who like to work out

The useful "Search" application is also present in Nokia E71. Its reserved line in the active stand-by menu no longer comes as a surprise. After all, an application this useful really deserves to be conveniently placed. The application itself finds almost every item in your Nokia based on a given keyword. From messages to settings, every bit of data is checked and results are then listed.

The search application

Finally, Nokia E71 features a dictionary with a rather rich database. English comes pre-installed but you can also download dozens of other languages for free from the Nokia website.

The built-in dictionary