The Nokia E71 is a new, long awaited phone belonging to the business-oriented Eseries line. Even though its name suggests that it is a successor to the E70 (equipped with large, unfolding, two-part QWERTY keyboard), the E71 follows the E61 and E61i design, offering large, 320x240 pixel, 2.36" screen and monoblock QWERTY keyboard of the "Blackberry" type.

Design

Bar-shaped QWERTY devices are pigeonholed as typical communication devices. As such, Nokia E71 can hardly impress with design: the crowded keypad and smallish - considering the available area - screen are not everybody's cup of tea. However, the E71 pulls of quite some style. It's much slicker than most messengers with its stylish steel casing and classy looks.

The earpiece of Nokia E71 is placed dead center at the top of the front panel. It's flanked by an ambient light sensor to the left and the video-call camera lens to the right. Below is the 2.36" display, followed by the main bank of control and navigation keys and the QWERTY keyboard. The screen, keyboard and controls will get their due coverage in a short while.

On the left side of the handset are the infrared port (a technology that's seemingly obsolete), the microSD card slot and the microUSB port. Both apertures are covered with plastic lids to hold off dirt and dust, and keep the contour of the handset intact.

The right side of Nokia E71 hosts the 2.5 mm standard audio jack and the two volume controls. Between them is the voice command key, which we doubt will be put to frequent use. Most other Nokia phones (outside the E-series, that is) use the right selection key for that purpose and it usually does a perfectly good job.

The loudspeaker of Nokia E71 is located at the top. The only other thing here is the red power key, which doubles as a shortcut to ringing profiles. We're not particularly fond of the choice of color for this key. The red knob is so out of line with the surrounding surface, it's ridiculous. But just wait and see that same knob in the white steel version of Nokia E71: it's utterly ridiculous. No really, what were they thinking?!

The back panel of Nokia E71 is a real treat. The dot-patterned stainless steel battery cover looks tremendous. Well, that's until those inevitable fingerprint smudges kick in to make the otherwise sweet metal surface a mess. Once it gets smudged, it's almost impossible to clean.

Rearside Nokia E71 features the 3 megapixel camera lens, with LED flash and a self-portrait mirror. The whole combo is covered under a transparent layer, which in turn has no protection whatsoever from scratches, except that it is a tiny bit recessed.

Removing the battery cover is quite sweet, all you need to do is gently squeeze the two release knobs on either side at the bottom and it pops up like a charm. Fitting it back in however is well harder: you'll need to push a few times before it locks properly. Furthermore, even when it's perfectly in place, a cleft is visible between the cover and the side panel of the phone, which looks like a rushed job really.

Like it or not, it's what's under the cover that's truly worth cheers: the 1500 mAh BP-4L Li-Ion whale of a battery. With a power plant like this one, seems like there's no stopping Nokia E71. It is quoted at 410 hours of stand-by time and 10 and a half hours of talk time and that's more than impressive.

In reality you can make it through three days of some really heavy usage. We used it for about two and a half hours of GPS navigation, two hours of web browsing over Wi-Fi, an hour of calls and about two hours of other phone features before it eventually went dead, about 80 hours after a full charge. Not bad, aye? If you tend to use it less, your Nokia E71 may as well last nearly a week.

The build quality of Nokia E71 is excellent and the stainless steel casing is a showoff. Nokia E71 feels nice in hand and operating it with one or two hands is equally easy. This goes true for typing too.

Keyboard

If there had to be one negative to the E71 (relax, it’s not the end of the world) it’s going to be the keyboard. Again, not a huge deal, but if we had to pick one thing to single out it’s the keyboard and it quite possibly won’t bother you. It did annoy us, though. Think of the physical keys on the E71 the same as the E61, just a lot smaller.

They’re also not as squishy which is nice, and they’re pretty easy to press once you get it down. Our issue is, again, Nokia has not learned the basic keyboard layout and we personally can’t stand it. On a normal QWERTY keyboard the letter “z” is not directly under the letter “a”. It’s either under the letter “s” or somewhere in between the two. This makes typing a royal bitch if you’re not looking directly at the keyboard and is totally unnecessary. All they had to do is stick the damn period key in front of the “z” key and all would be well. Again, this might not be a big deal to you if you’re coming from a QWERTY E-Series already, but for us hardcore freaks who bang away constantly on the keyboard, we’d like the normal layout that’s used on basically every other QWERTY phone on the planet. Fix it please, Nokia.

The keys have a nice white backlighting which makes them very easy to read. Just like the other models, the actual keys don’t light up, just the letters and symbols which makes for a very clean and sexy look.

Phonebook

The phonebook of Nokia E71 isn't any different from other Symbian handsets. We aren't really surprised by the lack of change, as it can hardly mean any more business. It is simply great - offering storage space for a virtually unlimited number of contacts and fields, with all the available memory potentially usable for the purpose. We can hardly imagine anyone filling that up.

Editing a contact offers an enormous variety of preset fields and you can replicate each of them as many times as you like. You can also create new fields if you happen to be able to think of any. Personal ringtones and video are also available for assigning. If you prefer, you may group your contacts and give a specific ringtone to each group. The Call log application, although not exactly a part of the phonebook, is also one of the Symbian elements. It can hold up to 20 call records in each of the tabs for outgoing, received and missed calls. These are all accessed by pressing the Call key in standby.

If you access the Log application from the main menu, you'll see a detailed list of all your network communications for the past 30 days. These include messages, calls and data transfers. You can even filter the entries (by contact or by type), a useful feature if you're looking for a specific call.

Music player

Full featured music abilities are not supposed to be make-or-break in a device like Nokia E71. However this doesn't make the onboard music player any less of a good application. After all, the Symbian S60 music player is a seasoned performer and it didn't cost Nokia anything to just put it in the E71 too.

The lack of dedicated music keys is easily overcome by the smooth D-pad control. There is a huge number of audio formats supported including MP3, AAC, eAAC+ and WMA. M3U playlists are also managed seamlessly and transferred files are added to the music library trouble-free by choosing the refresh option.

Filtering tracks by artist, album, genre and composer is automatic and searching tracks by gradual typing is also at hand. Tracks are uploaded to Nokia E71 via Bluetooth, USB or by simple download. You can also use a card reader for that purpose and transfer them directly to your memory card. Upon completing a USB transfer, the phone automatically prompts scanning for new music tracks and, if allowed to do so, adds the new ones to the music library.

The player comes with five equalizer presets (manually creating one is possible too) and stereo widening effect. You can also create new equalizer presets if the preloaded ones won't do. Finally, being one of Nokia's best equipped phones, Nokia E71 naturally also includes support for the A2DP Bluetooth profile, which allows listening to music on a Bluetooth stereo headset.

Camera

The camera is one element where Nokia E71 fails big time. It may sound decent on paper - 3 megapixel, LED flash and self-portrait mirror - but the reality is completely different. In fact the LED flash is not much of a treat, as its effective reach is quite limited and that's by far not the biggest issue with the camera.

The lack of lens protection is the first problem to come to mind. This means that the glass above the camera lens will get scratched in no time unless you use the leather case (or any other case) at all times. No dedicated camera key is also a downer: shooting isn't so comfortable and auto focus makes somewhat less sense.

Nokia went for a two key combination for shooting with the E71. You need to press the 'T' key for the camera to focus and then the confirmation center of the D-pad to take the actual photo. While this is still better than nothing, it's not nearly as comfortable as a standalone shutter key. It's just another clue that the camera wasn't the main concern of the Nokia R&D team.

The camera user interface is the same as in the Nokia flagship N95 8GB and that is basically the best thing about the E71 snapper. The camera offers extensive settings: from manual white balance and ISO sensitivity to exposure compensation, sharpness and contrast settings, as well as various effects, which are labeled color tones.

Gridline can also be applied to the viewfinder to assist you in framing you photos, using the photographic rule-of-thirds. Using it to align your subjects and place points of interest on or near the lines and their intersecting points makes your photos more professional and aesthetic. The sequence mode and self-timer are no news. The flash can be set to four positions: automatic, always on, red-eye reduction and always off.

The picture quality however is below average. Pictures lack detail and noise levels are high. The colors are also far from being precise and as a whole there is hardly anything good we can say about image quality.

ou can also have a look at a few comparison photos taken with the E71 and the Nokia 6210 Navigator (Now now, do we have a review in the works or don't we?). Not much to say here, we've got a clear winner. The new Nokia Navigator seems quite a capable performer when it comes to imaging.

Video recording is another great disappointment with the E71 camera. The business-minded handset only manages QVGA videos at 15 fps, which spells failure by our books. As a whole, the camera is the one feature of E71 yelling business-comes-first. Probably Nokia thought a better camera is not worth the effort in a business gadget. We can't help wondering why they didn't stick with the 2 megapixel shooter of the E61i in the first place.

Connectivity

The world must be changing. Remember when Nokia would hold every single feature above your head and never give you the perfect phone? Well, we’re finally getting past that. We’re not positive if there’s support for the 2100MHz band here, so for now, we’ll assume it doesn’t have it and there will be a US NAM model, and European model. In terms of the hard connectivity specs, you’ve got a quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE phone with 850MHz/1900MHz UMTS/HSDPA support, Wi-Fi 802.11 a,b,g, Bluetooth 2.0, and GPS. Like most recent Nokia’s, the GPS is assisted by the network, but fret not because there still is a physical GPS chip in here.

GPS navigation

Nokia E71 comes complete with a GPS receiver. Its sensitivity isn't the best you can find on the market but it can do the job if you aren't on a hurry. It takes its time getting initial lock and that can be as much as 10 minutes if you cold-start it in a moving car.

A-GPS can notably reduce this time but still won't come near the best examples on the market (let alone dedicated nav devices). A-GPS may also cost you extra if you aren't on a flat data rate. On the positive side, initial lock time after hot start is significantly better and rarely exceeds a few seconds.

The phone also comes with Nokia Maps preinstalled. The application pairs seamlessly with the built-in receiver and its version 2.0 is really nice to work with. It has a really detailed map coverage of a huge number of countries and a lot of extras such as traffic information, voice-guided navigation and so on. Unluckily, the extra features need to be purchased separately.

Still, we have to admit that Nokia Maps itself is not bad at all and gives the user little reason to grumble. It has very decent looks and easily customizable route planning algorithm. Toll roads and motorways can be avoided and so can tunnels and ferries. Route selection can be set to either fastest or shortest. The app is also usable for pedestrian navigation or you can switch the GPS receiver off and simply use the phone as an electronic map.

The overall impression of the Nokia E71 GPS functionality is positive, with only the GPS sensitivity allowing much room for improvement. Still, the E71 is good enough for most users' needs and won't cause much disappointment.

Conclusion

Nokia E71 is a powerful business tool - in fact it is one of the most capable we've ever seen. Plus, it has completed the demanding task of adding style and slick looks to the QWERTY messenger breed. The performance of Nokia E71 is praiseworthy, save for the below-par camera.

Rarely has a handset had us so impressed so quickly as the E71. The Nokia messenger seems a great purchasing option if you're after a device of this kind. We still feel a fair warning is due for those upgrading from E61 - the keypad and screen of E71 are notably smaller. If they can live with that though, nothing stands between them and the pure messenger power unleashed. As for the ones who like the business features but aren't so much into QWERTY keyboards - E66 is the way to go.

We admit to a tinge of excitement over a great rivalry shaping up with BlackBerry Bold. But it's fair to say that at this point every day of Bold delay is Nokia's gain, securing the E71 stand as the single ruler of the QWERTY messenger realm. It seems at least one long wait was well worth it.