My mobile phone contract was nearly over, so I called 3 to ask about my options, thinking I'd try to get a Nokia 6220 classic.

The salesman suggested the Nokia E71 was better and was available free on a $49 cap, so I got it instead.

The Nokia E71 (white)

It supports wireless LANs, VoIP, and has a longer battery life, but the camera isn't as good as the 6220's. It also does all the other usual stuff, including web, music, calendar, and games.

After using it for a day, I'm pleasantly surprised.

The keyboard layout is a bit different, being a full QWERTY keyboard. It's fine to use, but the right Navi key no longer works as backspace: instead it cancels the current operation - not a good thing if you're writing a long message. Still, you quickly get used to it.

It's smaller than it looks. It's very thin, and it's just narrow enough to hold it with one large hand.

Nokia E71 in my hand

It had a setup wizard that asked me if I wanted to copy all my contacts, appointments, and notes from my old phone over Bluetooth. Apart from the backspace key not working when entering a name for my new phone, it seems to have worked well.

The default 3 theme is fine but not particularly good looking and the Nokia ones are worse. Downloading some of PiZero's free themes makes it look and feel much nicer.

3 default theme

Nokia's icons

PiZero's icons

The screen is good. I can see more than I used to on my 6280, but obviously it's not as big as the iPhone's. Very clear, tho, and good fonts. Quite OK for browsing.

The built in browser isn't bad, but Opera Mini works a little better. The phone also supports Flash applications such as YouTube, but the sound was too choppy to be worthwhile.

Browsing The Age web site with Opera Mini

Google Maps uses the phone's builtin GPS receiver to show the current location on the map. It works OK, and looks really cool, but sometimes it takes over a minute to lock in.

Google Maps with GPS

The clock is really neat. When the phone is locked, you can hold the middle button down to see a full screen clock. I reduced the screensaver timeout to 10 seconds to make this work more to my liking.

Big clock

I've tried taking some photos, and the results are acceptable. As with all digital cameras I've tried, photos in poor light look quite grainy, but photos in good light look OK. I'll have to get some photos printed before I can really say how good the camera is.

On the home screen, there is an application shortcut list and a list of upcoming appointments, but it works a bit differently from my old Nokia 6280. Now, the so-called "active standby screen" means I can't press up, down, left, or right to launch an application. Instead, there are dedicated contacts, calendar, and messages keys, and you're better off using the application shortcut bar for everything else. I put the music player, Opera Mini, Gmail, the camera, and the clock there.

At first I was disappointed that there was no dedicated camera button, but the combination of the shortcut bar and the middle button to take the picture seem to work fine.

You can also rearrange most menus. This is pretty much necessary, since the default menus are cluttered. Thankfully the shortcut bar and shortcut keys should mean you don't have to even go into the menu very often.

I tried making a call last night with the supplied headphones, and you could easily hear noise. I think this was caused by the microphone brushing on my jacket. I'll try clipping it to my top next time. (Now I understand why my old headphones had an annoying neck loop.)

The ringtones sound really nice in a quiet environment or with the headphones, but the only one suitable for loud environments is the "Nostalgia" old style telephone. Still, one's better than none.

The power socket is the 2mm Nokia connector, so I can use all my old Nokia chargers. It also includes a USB to microUSB cable. It's only capable of USB 1.1, meaning the transfers will be slow but not painful at around one megabyte per second, for example it would take roughly one minute to copy an album of MP3s.

The Wi-Fi has been good for browsing the web and testing out the assisted GPS, but the killer application should be using it as a VoIP handset. Eventually I found a guide on Whirlpool that gave me the information I needed to set it up.

Making an internet phone call

The only other note I have to make is it's been pretty stable. It crashes reliably if you try to download a .sis theme file that it doesn't understand (presumably due to the wrong MIME type being sent by the server), but other than that I haven't noticed any problems, even while multi-tasking.

I'll try to post some photos I took with it tomorrow.