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!