I did lots (and lots and lots) of research on the e71, which was my choice to replace a Blackberry Pearl I'd had for a couple years. I needed to buy unlocked because 1.) my BB died one day, and 2.) I'm stuck on T-mobile. Because iPhones aren't "officially" unlocked, I settled on this e71, which seems to be Nokia's iPhone alternative.
After the giddiness of having a new phone wore off, I became more and more disappointed in this phone. It is certainly no iPhone (which my wife has), and isn't much better than my old Blackberry. Call quality is the best feature. That's about it.
Because Nokia has not updated the firmware for North American versions (e71-2 models, i.e. this one I bought from Amazon), there are a number of very annoying bugs in the operating system. Strike 1: The OS routinely crashes and reads "Memory Full" when it definitely is not full, and the only way to stop the warning screens from appearing is to reboot. Strike 2: The enclosed app for corporate email, called "Mail for Exchange" was so bad and difficult to configure that my IT guy and I finally gave up and bought a $50 RoadSync application that works OK. (As a comparison, it took my wife approximately 3 minutes to configure her iPhone for corporate MS Exchange email.) Strike 3: The phone sometimes makes an awful popping sound when playing keypad tones or application chimes, It is like the clicking and popping sound you get when speakers overload or get too much signal. Others have experienced this on the Nokia support boards, as well, and it may be a hardware issue.
OS bugs aside, there are also significant hardware disadvantages of this piece compared with the iPhone. The screen isn't wide enough to see a full line of sender, date, and email subject on the screen. You have to guess sometimes at what the message might be. This makes the chances of opening SPAM from the coporate server a lot greater, in my experience. The camera is merely adequate, and mine casts a purple hue to all pictures -- not uncommon, according to other users. I can manually set it to Sepia mode and it looks better, but that's a pain. My wife's iPhone takes great photos as is.
By far the most annoying "feature" of this phone is in setting up ring tones and alert tones. In the Blackberry, you can indicate how many times you want a tone to ring. It seems that, in this Nokia, it's either ON or OFF. Sometimes I want an alert to ring once, and that's it. Maybe a single chime to let me know about an email or something. The sounds on the e71 just keep going and going until you manually silence them.
I bought this phone mainly because I thought Nokia had a reputation for quality and solid phones. It also had a full size, real qwerty keyboard, which I prefer to the screen-based keyboard of the iPhone. The construction of the phone is solid. It has nice build quality. It's pretty. But this and the qwerty keyboard benefit doesn't make this phone worth all the trouble of the other numerous issues.
My T-Mobile contract is up in February, and I'm headed to the Apple Store to get an iPhone unless Nokia updates the e71 firmware for N. America. I'll end up selling this one on eBay for a loss, and I'll be happy as a clam to get rid of it. Overall, my experience with the phone as my main corporate and personal communicator has been at the most satisfactory. My apologies to all the Nokia fanatics out there, but the iPhone beats this brick by a mile.Get more detail about Nokia E71 Unlocked Phone with 3.2 MP Camera, 3G, Media Player, GPS, Wi-Fi, and MicroSD Slot--U.S. Version with Warranty (Gray).
No comments:
Post a Comment