Nokia E71 - User Pros and Cons
Nokia_E71-Review1
Here is E71 - User Pros and Cons,
Having owned this phone for 2 days I must admit to being very impressed by it. I’ve owned many Nokia before and this is something special. The battery life is extraordinary.
Pros (Lightly covered) :
Remote lock - phone gets stolen, use mates phone to send a pre-defined code, phone locks, thief gets code wrong 3 times, phone get erased, Great!
Aesthetics - All metal, perfect build quality, feels indescribably ‘right’ (like the iphone 3g)
Speed - No waiting for apps to load, so refreshing for the impatient like me
Breathing status light - Thank you Nokia for getting rid of the mega strobe, smoothing white glows are the way to go, not ‘emergency blue panic’ strobes
Connect PC to web - Plug Phone via USB to (windows) PC and a small programme is installed that let you use the phone as a 3g modem. I can get about 2Mb/s with this. (A mac version would be totally sweet as well)
Standard features - Good syncing with mac (there is an isync plug-in), great email and messaging etc.
Camera isn’t the best - Who cares, it’s a business phone, heck many companies don’t allow camera phones on their premises. It seems that they had to sacrifice the quality and size of the CCD or CMOS to get the phone so slim. Same goes for the headphone adapter- something had to go, but please ship with a mini to 3.5 adapter please.
Cons :
Chat - Nokia, where did your excellent chat application go. You did it first, the iphone stole it, then you dropped it. It was so useful. Most SMS’s are send as part of a ‘txt conversation’, a back and forth reciprocation of text as opposed to one off ‘pings’ Bring back chat!
Voice communication button - Located between the volume buttons this pretty button serves little purpose. Press and hold = voice activated features (the same thing that the top right blue button does) Am I missing something here? Was this designed for push to talk?
No network manager - I have no reception at home but my E71 is set to auto-retrieve my emails. The only way I can get it to use my Wi-Fi instead of Cell is to dig deep into the email sub-menus and change the access point on both incoming and outgoing mail on both my email accounts. Annoying and time consuming.
What you should have is a smart network manager that checks the status of GSM 3g, WiFi, HSPDA (3.5g) and assigns the best one for the entire phone to use. E.g When I go to a location with no Cell reception the phone should AUTOMATICALLY fall back to WiFi to check emails, internet radio (not fully working on E71 yet but really great), remote sync (more to say about this).This is what the iphone does and although it’s sometimes a little slow to fall back to wifi, it’s totally transparent to the user and makes operation of that device much more smooth and graceful.
Perhaps a developer could build an app that does this and creates a virtual access point that all the other phone app can see and stay connected to by default. This virtual access point would then automatically switch between actual access point (mainly GPRS, WIFI, 3G) Steal this idea!
Give more power to the buttons - A certain half eaten fruit manufacturer released a phone with 1 main button (3 minor ones) replacing buttons with a big *ss screen, they sold millions of devices and caused a minor revolution. Suddenly buttons have become, like sooo last week. The E71 has loads of them, let us be able to take advantage of that. Give us more power to the buttons. E.g space bar should do something when pressed like light up the flash so we can find our keys, or like firefox, scroll down the page when browsing the internet. Allow the user to assign apps, bookmarks, macros to individual keys e.g In the standby screen, push and hold ‘S’ to start the Sports Tracker app and begin and new training routine. The keyboard can be so much more powerful.
Light/Flash - Perhaps the E71 drives the Xenon flash harder and brighter than it should. Would prolonged use kill it? If so what about PWM (Pulse Width Modulation). Basically make the light flash really quickly (50hz) to make it look like it is constantly on, only less bright and using less power. How about that, is it a hardware issue?
Unadvertised unsupported great features - Another comparison has to be made here between the E71 and iphone. Apple thoroughly advertise all the features of their phones and they SUPPORT them as well. E.g Mobile Me - Not a new concept, in fact Nokia got their before they did
Infrared - Give us a reason to use this, supply the phone with TV remote software.
I mean, who knew the E71 could be synced ‘over the air’. This could be so useful. E.g A family of 3 each has an E71 (or Symbian phone). They all share a single public calender as well as their own private one. Instant access to each others holidays trips, meeting etc. I know for a fact that this would go down well in my household. There are a few third party solutions to this but who can be bothered researching, checking forums etc. Nokia, partner with and manage one of them,(or just employ a group of jobless graduates and let them work it out by themselves) then offer the service under the Nokia name to your users.(stick a leaflet in the packaging with the manuals, CD’d etc)
Calender app not perfect- It should be if you expect people to ditch their Filofax’s and Blackberries (the latter I know you are trying for) I admit it’s good (combined with iCal OS X I’m trialing a digital calender system for the next few months) but some settings need work to speed up data entry. I’m assume you are aiming for the same speed as pen and paper, you are half way there so far.
Wow, well what was meant to be a quick 10 line comment but it got a bit too passionate. I guess the above can be thought of as a open brainstorm directed at Nokia, heck I’m no where nearly finished, if you are reading this from Nokia I’d love to help you improve this, get in touch and thanks for the reviewer, phatenterprise (at) gmail.com