Back in July of last year, we took a look at the Nokia E71, an unlocked smartphone capable of surfing AT&T’s 3G network. Since then, AT&T has picked up the phone for its own, subsidized offering, and the Nokia E71x is available now from AT&T for only $100 with a contract agreement. The new phone sees a few improvements, including the new Symbian S60 Feature Pack 2, though instead of the newer Symbian interface, the phone is mostly built around AT&T’s sponsored apps.
Design – Very Good
Even after 10 months, the Nokia E71x is still the best looking slab QWERTY phone on the market. It certainly beats its rivals on AT&T, the Samsung BlackJack II and the Motorola Q, by a country mile. Like those earlier slabs, the Nokia E71x lacks a touchscreen, but we never missed it. The phone is a slim, slick device, now clad in an aggressively cool black color. It has a steel housing, giving it a dense, sturdy feel, though all that metal adds some extra weight.
Though there are some visual improvements in the new Symbian S60 feature pack 2, they’re hardly noticeable, and the Symbian OS lags behind farther than ever. Even Windows Mobile Smartphone (non-touchscreen) is a better looking OS. On the Nokia E71x, the menus are repetitive and confusing, the shortcuts never offer to take you where you want to go, and behind every corner is a confusing configuration menu of some sort. The main menu screen is cluttered with AT&T’s junk, from YellowPages.com (which does not deserve its own icon), to the AT&T Music icon, which actually leads to yet another menu, and not the music player.
The phone also loses some interesting elements from the Nokia E71 unlocked version. The older phone had a mode switch option that let the user swap between a set of business-minded defaults and personal settings. The new phone is all business.
Calling – Very Good
Calls on our Nokia E71x review unit sounded good, but not quite as good as they did on the E71 that we tested. The phone made calls that sounded a bit metallic and tinny. Calls were a bit bright, and could distort on the high end. Reception was still solid. Battery life, too, was comparable. We approached 5 hours again with straight calling, and noticed the same dramatic drop-off when the phone was checking our Exchange server more regularly.
One of our favorite features on the Nokia E71, and on all Windows Mobile Smartphones, is the ability to start searching the contact list from the home screen by simply typing a contact’s name. You start typing, the phone starts searching. Not so on the Nokia E71x. This phone simply dials numbers from the home screen, a strange feature to remove on AT&T’s part. The address book is adequate, with plenty of fields for a smartphone. We wish the call logs were a bit more intelligent. We like seeing call durations, and we love when a phone can append that information directly to a contact, neither of which the E71x can handle.
Otherwise, the Nokia E71x has all our favorite calling features. Speaker-independent voice dialing works better on this phone than on many other Nokia phones we’ve tried in the past. It wasn’t perfect, but it worked about 3/4 of the time in our tests. The speakerphone was nice and loud, but not abusively so.
Messaging – Very Good
The Nokia E71x has an impressive array of messaging options, and it keeps up with some of the best phones AT&T has to offer. Text messaging was straight forward, lacking the threaded messaging support we’re seeing on today’s best new smartphones. With threaded messaging, text messaging line up in a conversation to look like an IM chat. Speaking of IM, AT&T’s Nokia E71x gets support for Oz’s instant messaging app, a feature the unlocked version lacked. You can chat with buddies over AOL, MSN or Yahoo messaging services, which is nice, but we’d like to see Gtalk support.
The Nokia E71x support Microsoft Exchange through Nokia’s Mail for Exchange app. The app doesn’t come preloaded, you have to download the app to set up the service. We had a lot of trouble getting this to work properly. We entered our settings numerous times, then downloaded the app only to find a blank browser window and no way to find the downloaded app on the phone. After a restart, it magically appeared, but we had to enter our server setting yet another time. Once we got that squared away, the app worked like a charm, synchronizing our e-mail, contacts and calendar. The Nokia app is not as smart as Outlook on a Windows Mobile device. You can’t browser subfolders, and it won’t display messages in their proper, HTML format. It’s also a battery hog. But it does add a lot of value to this stylish device, and having Exchange support pushes this phone past the WinMo competition.
The keyboard on the Nokia E71x started to wear on us during this trial run. Though its physically the same keyboard, after months of testing phones with wider keys, we had trouble with the QWERTY keyboard on the E71x. For a full keyboard, it seemed too narrow, and we made numerous typing errors. In a 160-character message, we made almost a dozen errors we had to correct later. An auto correct feature would hit the spot.
Scheduling and Productivity – Very Good
For scheduling and productivity, the Nokia E71x gets plenty of options. We just wish they were a little more polished looking. For some reason, the nice calendar from the original E71, with its month view that showed a list of active appointments, is gone, replaced by an even uglier wireframe calendar. The E71x hardware has a nice row of shortcut buttons beneath the screen, borrowing liberally from Palm’s Treo devices. These shortcuts for e-mail, calendar and contacts were very useful, though, so we’re happy to see Nokia branching out a bit.
For productivity, the Nokia E71x gets a basic version of the QuickOffice suite. You can read and edit Office documents, but to attack the newest document formats or to create new documents on the phone, you’ll have to pay for an upgrade. The best Windows Mobile phones get this capability for free. There are also a bunch of other productivity apps, including a currency converter and a mobile banking app.
Web browsing – Very Good
The Nokia mini-map Web browser is one of the best Web browsers on any mobile device. It is almost as good as the Apple iPhone Safari browser, though navigating pages is a bit easier on the iPhone. The Nokia E71x makes good use of Nokia’s browser and AT&T’s fast network. Pages loaded very quickly and looked sharp and accurate on the device’s screen. The phone’s mini-map gives you an overview of the page while you scroll, and scrolling was very fast and smooth using only the 4-way button. We especially like the “back” view that gives you thumbnails of recent pages to cycle back through. Our only complaint is that Nokia makes it unusually difficult to navigate to a page. It’s easy if you have a bookmark you want to use, but entering a URL is a hidden option under a “Navigation Options” submenu.
Multimedia – Good
We were disappointed by the multimedia handling on the unlocked version of the Nokia E71. For the E71x, AT&T has taken the same features and buried them beneath more menus. The media player on the Nokia E71x is good, and has plenty of advanced playback options. But it isn’t as pretty or well-organized as the media experience on an Nseries device like the Nokia N95. AT&T has some great music phones in their lineup, including a few Walkman phones, so the competition is fierce, and we wish Nokia had put their best effort into this device. We’re also puzzled why Nokia, or any manufacturer, would use a 2.5mm headphone jack on a high end phone, instead of a standard 3.5mm jack.
For video playback, the Nokia E71x was able to play our video clips smoothly, so long as they were compacted to fit the QVGA, 320 by 240 pixel display. Movies were fluid with no pixel artifacts or stuttering. Playback controls are completely absent. Once a video was playing, we could pause or stop, but we couldn’t fast forward or rewind. This was a strange omission, and only reiterates our point that Nokia can do much better, but they left multimedia fans out in the cold on this phone.
Camera – Mediocre
The Nokia E71x uses a 3-megapixel shooter with auto focus, but you’ll never notice because the phone was completely unable to focus properly in our tests. In every shot, the camera either focused incorrectly on the background image instead of the foreground subject, or, when there was no background, it simply didn’t focus at all. If there is auto focus on this camera, it’s hard to tell, and the phone doesn’t use a two-stage button to help you lock in an image, like all good cameras and AF-capable phones. These sample images represent the best we could get in multiple shots of the same subject.
Video performance was slightly better, but only because the videos were too small for serious criticism. While some other Nokia devices can shoot VGA video, the camera on the Nokia E71x is only capable of taking QVGA movies. At this resolution, videos looked good, free from pixels and the watery effect we see on other cameraphones.
GPS – Very Good
For GPS navigation, the Nokia E71x ditches Nokia Maps and heads for AT&T Navigator. While it might not be as robust, AT&T Navigator from TeleNav is a much more friendly app, focused on turn-by-turn navigation. In our tests, it worked very well. The phone found our location quickly and followed us through all our turns.
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