Nokia E71 Does it all. (Nokia E71 with Contract)

Member Name: Patman99

Product:	Nokia E71 with Contract
Date:	24/05/09 (65 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Access your email on the go, whilst keeping in touch via Skype.

Disadvantages: Hard to get it to senad emails via your own isp

Well, what can I say about the E71?, I've had mobile phones for 12 years, and in all that time I've never owned a Nokia. Well, all that changed when I paid a visit to my local 3mobile shop.
Among their range of phones was the 'E71', a phone with a proper qwerty keyboard, mobile broadband, WiFi, Bluetooth and infrared connectivity. All for £20 a month for the next 18 months.
What impressed me was the build quality, this is definately a phone that won't snap in half any time soon. The screen is also bright enough to be usable in daylight as well (unlike my S/E W910). One of the things that attracted me to this phone/package was the 'unlimited mobile broadband' (in reallity about 1Gb/month), and the ability to use the phone as a wifi hotspot with the addition of 'Joikuspot'. This gives me the ability to use my notebook to surf the net using my phone as an access point, thus increasing its usability no-end. The only thing you need to take into consideration is that when using wifi, the battery really takes a hammering.

Other features that I found useful included the 'Email' facility, although geared towards '3mail', it can be set-up to access your own email in box, as well as those from 'AOL', 'yahoo', 'google' and 'hotmail' as well as others.
I did manage to set-up my personal email account on it quite easily, but only for email retrieval. I have yet to get it to send emails via this account, despite putting-in all the correct settings.

When used on '3', the phone comes with pre-set links to many sites including 'Ebay', 'Youtube', 'Facebook' & 'Skype'. You can also tweet on twitter, but you need access to a computer in order to set up a twitter account as the E71 can't handle captcha boxes.

In order to use 'Skype', it needs to be downloadede and installed on the phone, unfortunately, '3's pre-set hotlink doesn't find an launch it, so you have to navigate to the installation folder and run it from there.

3mail also requires inputting of a lot of info in order to set it up to send & receive emails. The 3 website isn't that clear on how to do it, but after a bit of searching on the net, I actually managed to get it sending & receiving emails. It really is worth persivering with this, as it makes the whole phone much more usable.



Other features include mobile versions of Word, Excel & Powerpoint, as well as a calender and contacts manager. Add to this 'video calling', a camera, music player & radio, and you have quite a neat little package.

Summary: Neat and extremely well-built piece of kit.