Everything But A Camera !
You know those reviews that say ‘this is the handset with everything’? They can’t be right, because no handset can make you a cup of tea. But if you are on the hunt for a mobile email machine with a good wodge of extra features packed in Nokia’s E61 could be it.
The most notable absentee in the features list – tea making facilities aside – is a camera. The E61 is one in a series of handsets, the, er, E series, and they are primarily aimed at the business community. Missing out cameras makes those companies afraid of people taking sneaky photos of their secret plans (or whatever) happier.
The fact that you can’t make video calls or take snaps of something it would be useful to show to a colleague, is obviously less important here and if those things matter to you, look elsewhere for a handset.
This isn’t to say that ordinary consumers might not be interested in the E61 too, though. It’s main task –delivering email to you while on the move – can be achieved either thanks to enterprise networks which whang out to you via their servers, or thanks to a quick poll of your ordinary old POP3 personal email.
The E61 has Wi-Fi built in, so if you are in the vicinity of a network you can use for free you don’t even have to pay connection charges for email retrieval. Bluetooth is here too, and so is infra red, which means you have the full monty of wireless communications options.
Hopping onto a wireless LAN for email pickup or using the E61’s Web browser is a simple matter of getting the device to search for WLANs and then choosing the one you want from the list proffered.
Having mentioned the Web browser, this seems a good time to look at it in more detail. The E61 runs Symbian Series 60 3rd Edition, and this has a different browser to that which appears in Series 60 2nd edition.
The E61 has a wide format screen, so that its 320 pixels are along the horizontal, its 240 pixels on the vertical. The wide format would be great for reading Web pages rendered to the full width of the screen, but the browser doesn’t do that, so you have to pan horizontally to read most sites.
This is probably the biggest irritation of the E61.
The browser’s saving grace is its Page Overview mode. This gives you a look at an entire Web page in miniature. You move around it and a red box highlights a section as you go. You can zoom into this section. In theory this is supposed to make pinpointing what you want to look at easy. In practice it’s not always ideal as text and headlines for pages are, for the most part, illegible so it is not always easy to identify what you are looking for.
Now I’ve mentioned moving around the screen it must be time to look at the usability side of things.
A mini joystick sits under the screen and it is that that you use to move around within Web sites. In the Web browser it manipulates an on screen cursor makes it really easy to find links and click them. On the main screen you use it to move through application shortcuts, and so on.
The joystick is accompanied by two buttons, one marked as the Nokia menu button and one marked with an envelope icon. As you might guess, the former takes you to the Nokia applications menu, the latter to a messaging application from which you can manage your emails, SMS and MMS messages.
Outside these buttons, on left and right, are two long,thin softmenu buttons, and beneath them Call and End buttons.
The only side buttons are on the left – a button which when pressed quickly starts the built in sound recorder and when held down lets you issue voice commands, and a volume rocker.
But of course we’ve missed out the most important buttons of all – the keyboard. The qwerty arrangement is standard, with some keys shared by numbers for digit dialling, and some shared by symbols you might want to use. As on an ordinary keyboard, there’s a ‘shift’ key to get to the secondary symbols.
Things like the full stop and ‘@’ symbol are separated out for ease of use. There’s no ‘£’ on the keyboard, but you can get to a symbol picker with a double press of the Chr key on the bottom left of the keyboard, and this remembers the last symbol you used.
We found tapping out short messages was pretty comfortable. Nokia may think you might like to do more, though, as in a folder labelled Office sits spreadsheet, presentations and document creation software. You can create documents and then email them off to others, or if you create a presentation, you can use the Screen Export software that is also in this folder to send it to a projector over Bluetooth. Apparently. We didn’t try this.
Obviously cramming a reasonable mini keyboard and relatively large screen into a pocket sized device means it needs to be bigger than the average handset, and in fact not surprisingly the E61 is about BlackBerry sized. It has 64MB of built in memory for you to fill, and supports miniSD cards if you need more. Nokia has put the card slot under the battery cover but not under the battery, so you can hotswap cards if necessary.
Battery life is important on a device you intend to carry around, and Nokia reckons you can get up to nine and a half hours of GSM talktime, up to five hours of 3G. This should be enough to get even the busiest of executives through an overnight trip without lugging a charger around with them.
This review covers the above mobile phone only and does not address the performance of any 3G Network. The score is based on a 3G mobile phone checklist.
Copyright : You are advised that this material is the copyright of www.3G.co.uk and is our own personal view only. (C) All rights reserved 2005. Whist every care has been taken in the preparation of this review, the author nor 3G.co.uk cannot be held responsible for the accuracy or authenticity of the information it contains, or consequence arising from it.
|
