Nokia E71

Nokia E71 boasts of OS improvement, improved PIM functionality, and a cosmetic upgrade over its Nokia E61 cousin. The recent facelift apparently placed Nokia E61 in league with Apple’s iPhone. While the latter is good for media consumption, the Nokia E61 is for media creation due to its wide array of data making features.

The Symbian OS pre-installed packs a webkit from Apple’s safari, flash animation support, and compatibility highlights with applications from Opera mini and Skyfire. These features alone would make any mobile professional happy, but Nokia E61 also boasts of office productivity features out of the box including QuickOffice, Active Notes, Dictionary, Zip archiver/decompressor, Adobe PDF reader. There is also an IM application that makes you connect to AIM, Google Talk, Yahoo and most of the major IM services.

 As usual, Nokia is still the leading GPS provider with the Nokia E71 providing cellular triangulation features that can lock on the phone’s location in 30 seconds when outdoors. The free version of Nokia Maps 2.0 is embedded with the phone and does well for casual mapping. Frequent travelers would opt for the paid aspects of the program including voice guidance and Lonely Planet assistance.

As a communicator, the Nokia E71 still has the standard messaging application of most of the Nokia phones from SMS, MMS, and email. POP3 and IMAP protocols are supported and as an added bonus, the Nokia Mail for Exchange feature can be installed out of the box for easy data and media synchronization.

The Nokia E71 has upgraded multi-media features. In addition to the enhanced 3.2 megapixel camera; the phone also boasts of the Nokia Music Player and Podcast features, Internet Radio application, and compatibility with Nokia’s Ovi multimedia sharing service. The camera itself captures solid still photos but as with some Nokia cameras, can be sensitive to light. The video capture, unfortunately, does not have anti-shake feature but it does a good job of showing the scene and capturing volume ranges.

Pictures taken using the Nokia E71 can utilize the geo-tagging features imbedded within the phone and can then be uploaded to Nokia’s very own Ovi site or through Flicker. The uploaded image would then not only display the photo but also a map on where the image was taken.