A good friend gave me a Nokia E61 to try out recently.
There are several things I don’t like about the phone:
- It is huge!
- It is really wide (to accommodate the qwerty keyboard) but this means your hand quickly becomes tired holding it to your ear for any prolonged period.
- It doesn’t have a camera (this might sound trivial but I have really come to depend on having ready access to a camera and it was having access to a cameraphone that allowed me to capture this image easily, for instance). And
- There are no games included (ok, that one was a bit trivial!)
However, the E61 does have a couple of nice features:
- The qwerty keyboard ironically, takes some unlearning to get used to but once you do, it does really speed up typing on the phone and
- The fact that the E61 has built-in wifi means that I can now use services like Truphone to make free and very cheap calls from my mobile anytime I have access to wifi.
Truphone also gives me a US landline number (+1 425 905 3151). This is handy as I will be able to receive calls when I am in the US on that number, without having to pay any roaming costs as long as I have wifi.
Truphone also has an offer on at the moment giving away free calls to landlines in 40 countries until the end of June! Excellent.
I can now make free calls to landlines, from my wifi network at home (at higher call quality than my GSM network at home!!!), using the E61.
Now all I need is a cameraphone with wifi!
That would be the e70 or the n80i then? However, I really don’t like the e70 despite having a flip out qwerty keywboard that gets around the bulky problem of the e61. The n80i isn’t bad but I personally think it’s a little thick, prefer slimmer phones myself.
No Camera is a plus for me as many large companies will not allow you into their data centers with a camera phone for security reasons. Same with Dept of Justice as well.
Don’t forget you can get Putty on the phone now.
John
Thanks for that review Tom. I know I’ve been evangelizing the super-duper N95 for ages now but strangely I’ve come around to thinking it’s just not worth the money. So now I’m taking a second look at other Nokia options like the E61. I rather like the idea of having a qwerty keyboard actually, especially now that I’m doing so much twittering! 😉
In fact the E70 looks like a really interesting alternative. Must go check the reviews on that phone.
Nearly forgaot that OS X 10.4.9 offers native support for E61s in iSync as well 🙂
I think the Nokia E61i has a camera, Tom.
@Jonathan – the E65 looks like a very nice phone
@John – Putty and iSync are fantastic. iSync makes the job of transferring info between phones a dead simple 2 minute operation. I love it.
@Paul – Yes it does. However, it has the same size problem as the E61!
Tom,
I have the E70 instead of the E61 for the exact reasons you specified.
E70 is grand, qwerty is usable but not great for long mails. For me, the biggest thing about push mail, was to be up-to-date on my inbox. If I need to respond, I can, otherwise it can wait until I get back to a PC. One thing about all the current Nokia S60 phones is the lack of RAM which is common on all of them – can be a pain when the browser crashes!
Just my 2 cents!
Richard
I got the E61 there at Christmas, takes a lot of getting used to alright and a lot of slagging from friends about your new calculator! But it’s grown on me and Putty on the phone is well handy but it’s really slow to do stuff. Theres a noticeable 2 second delay when opening a new text message. Anyone else get this
You and your girly hands Tom.
@Richard – good point on the RAM
@Georgie – you might want to look into changing where the new text button is. That can make a significant difference to how long it takes to open.
@dahamsta – ROFL