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Nokia E71

Author Jonathan Bray
Published 8th Jul 2008
Manufacturer Nokia
Price £262.08 (Exc VAT)
as reviewed £307.94 (Inc VAT)
Latest Price Click here
Design & Features Score 10 for Design & Features
Performance Score 10 for Performance
Value Score 10 for Value
Overall Score 10 for Overall
Nokia E71
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Comments for Nokia E71

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Comment Tommy K said on 8th July 2008

well ill be. All this iphone nonsense and Nokia come up with a phone that does everything I want. Apple fans can eat all the gimmicks they like, ill stick with something that works.

Comment Garfee said on 9th July 2008

I can only echo your statement, Tommy. I'm still intrigued as to what RIM are going to do with their Blackberry mobile's though. This phone ticks all the boxes however, and i'll be tempted to see what it is like in a shop before committing.

Comment lifethroughalens said on 9th July 2008

Touché. I'll second that TK. I've had an E90 (which was just too brick like, but amazingly functional) and then an E51....which is the best phone i've ever owned. It does everything this E71 does, but is a tad smaller but at only £170 new it is an amazing deal. I don't think i'll be tempted to get this one because I don't get along with tiny keyboards (found that out on the E90). But it's still miles ahead of the 'GodPhone3G' in terms of business functionality, looks & size. Is it just me or does anyone else think that the iPhone is just too big? It may be iconic in design, but I think it's rapidly turing into the 'Audi TT' of mobile phones!

Comment Mikko Lahti said on 9th July 2008

Like Tommy K said, I too have been dodging around all this iPhone craze, waiting for something to replace my Nokia E71 so that I wouldn't have to give in to the temptation that is the iPhone.

Comment john said on 9th July 2008

Dam a 10 out of 10 for everything on this phone!!. Has got me tempted, will look into it further.

It's so easy to forget about the iphone, why pay £100 and be tied into a 18 month contract. With so many new phones coming out over a 12 month period, it be crazy to be tied into a 18 month contract for phone that is over priced. I will probably get the E71 on a 12 month contract and buy the ipod touch.

Comment ibar78 said on 9th July 2008

I've been closely following the launch of the Nokia E71 and all the reviews I have read so far have been very positive so much so I've gone ahead and placed an order!

Comment Norbury said on 9th July 2008

Only downside for me is lack of WiFi.

Comment Gordon said on 9th July 2008

Only downside is losing half your screen to a keyboard ;)

Comment Brodock said on 9th July 2008

Uh, it does have Wifi.

Comment Jay said on 9th July 2008

I'd rather use a keyboard than a touchscreen - personal preference though. And the E71 does have wireless which I've added to the review.

Comment Gordon said on 9th July 2008

Depends which touchscreen Jay... though most are indeed horrible implemented.

Comment Mikko Lahti said on 9th July 2008

*correction to my comment, I meant that I have a Nokia E70, and I'm looking forward to this E71*

Comment jamie hancox said on 9th July 2008

Looks like my Tytn II is on it's way out... was always too big to be a phone anyway!

Comment ffrankmccaffery said on 9th July 2008

Lads be carefull with the non-existent jesusphone comparisons, this'll only encourage the ilemmings onto this so far unpolluted board. As for the phone itself well my 6310i's finally started to show signs of ageing and this alongside its little brother the E51 could very well fit into its big shoes

Comment Norbury said on 10th July 2008

Oh aye, read the review a couple of times trying to see a mention of wifi, and there it is. Couldn't see it for looking.

Comment Randy said on 11th July 2008

I'm not sure do i own E51 or do this phone own me. (in Soviet Russia!)

That's good, E-series have crystalised themselves as the most practical and well made phones on the market today. The N-phones now seem a bit for posers, really.

Don't mock iPhone though, it's still solid fashion statement, and this is not nessesarily a bad thing.

I eagerly await for E-clamshell, i've got a sneaking suspicion that it'll look awesome.

Comment Sivart said on 12th July 2008

Upgrading in September from my trusted HTC Tytn II to either the HTC Touch Diamond or this E71. Unless I missed it in the review, as usual, there is no mention of the internet browsing experience on the E71. Is it as good as the Opera on the Touch Diamond?

Comment GoldenGuy said on 13th July 2008

SDHC slot? If so, up to what?

Comment vincent said on 13th July 2008

Bought the E71 last week in replacement of HTC TyTN.
T-Mobile being too slow to bring new phones to the market, and with contract up for renewal, I was offered a price rebate from £42 to £17.5 and therefore bought the E71 from supergps.co.uk (as refered to by trustedreviews).
First of all, I must admit that the experience with them was appaling, bad phone customer service, arrogant people and the 'next day delivery' took actually 3 days.

I didn't know what to expect of the E71 as it is my 1st Nokia. I chose it based on the back of the great review it got here and on other sites.
I wanted a phone with full keyboard (not sliding) and all the whistles and bells, gps, wifi, 3G, etc...
So far, after 3 days, I am totally converted to the E71.
Amazing phone in every respect!
Call quality is quite an improvement on the HTC, and I had forgotten that calls could be so clear.
Connecting to wifi is a breeze, so is 3G. I remember how I struggled with the HTC. As a matter of fact, I hardly ever used internet with it in the last months.
Browser is very good and very quick. Much much better than HTC was.
Nokia and Google maps are easy peasy to use too.
Keyboard, whilst small is very usable and one hardly makes a mistake.
My wife however prefers her Blackberry, because she types using her nails...
The E71 is packed with loads of great features: conversion software, dictionary etc..

Absolutely love the size and looks of it. Whole metal, light but not too light, and most importantly, extra thin!

No regrets on not getting the JesusPhone!

Comment BrainStreetCeo said on 28th July 2008

I use Blackberry Connect on my E61i...wonder if it's available for the E71?

Comment Christienne said on 30th July 2008

it's available to preoder in the UK on http://shop.nokia.co.uk

Comment clifford said on 12th August 2008

If you are planning on buying the E71, do not do it from the nokia online shop. If there are any issues with delivery or the order, the staff are most un-helpfull. They are used to selling to bulk customers. You are better off getting it from a regular supplier

Comment joeypesci said on 14th August 2008

Upgraded my contract to a better one for only £5 more than I was paying and a free E71. I haven't put the sim in yet as the contract don't start till Tuesday. But played with the phone connecting to my home wifi. I have to say, I'm disappointed. The phone is no where near as good as everyone is raving. Have never used Symbian before I realise why, it's shit. It's really not user friendly and I'm an IT engineer.

My wifi at home is hidden and has mac filtering. The problem is the hidden. Means I have to go into connections most times to connect to the wifi from there. In other applications they seem to be incapable of seeing the hidden wifi you've setup in connectivity.

Mail for exchange is a nightmare to setup. Has a big bug in it that makes your profile disappear. You have to exit it before it will reappear. Also the error today 'cause Mail For Exchange to totally disappear as if it wasn't installed.

I couldn't install most of the software at first, then found via connecting the phone to Nokia Suite, that I think it was 'cause Nokia Suite wasn't actually installed on the phone. Had to do that before Nokia Suite would work. Once I unplugged the phone and plugged it back in. Nokia Suite refused to detect it. I had to reinstall Nokia Suite about twice before it would detect the phone again.

GPS appears to be poor. I went in the garden and it picked me up within seconds. I've just walked to the post box and back and it didn't pick me up till I got back to the house.

Within certain applications that require network access. Some won't allow you to connect to the net via the wifi and insist on a sim card being installed into the phone.

When playing games or applications with sound there appears to be no quick easy way to turn the volume down. The volume controls that control the media player don't appear to work for games, which is odd.

Overall the phone is a big disappointment and doesn't deserve the praise it's getting. And the Symbian OS REALLY needs to be reworked.

Comment joeypesci said on 15th August 2008

I was pulling my hair out today, this phone REALLY is getting on my nerves. I've asked 3 if I can send it back for a different phone, they'd said yes within the 14 days.

Mail for exchange wasn't preinstalled I had to do it myself. Worse than that, I thought the bugs were caused by it being mail for exchange 2.0.4 so updated to 2.0.5. Made no difference, still the same "System Error". Attempting a Full Sync constantly produces a "System Error". It's shocking how any of this got past Beta testing or any of the raring reviews I've read for this phone. Mail for exchange is far from easy to setup.

I was trying again with Mail for Exchange. The nasty "System Error" bug just kept kicking it. Once it does your profile disappears and if you go into communications, mail for exchange also disappears as if not on the phone and you have to go back to the mail for exchange setup. You'll find your profile but you have to set the sync options up all over again, only for it to them do the "System Error" again (it's pot luck if you get it, but it's more often than not).

Once it did connect it synced my calender to the exchange but totally ignored all my 100+ e-mails and didn't copy them to the phone.

Surfing the net. Now this is suppose to have WLAN IEEE 802.11b/g, but it doesn't act like it. The load speeds are terrible. Not only that but I set it up to use works Access Point. They only use simple WEP (crazy I know) and it connects fine. I setup a copy of bookmarks the other day at work, using the phone on their AP. Worked fine. Then today I try to connect to those same bookmarks and get a gateway errror, on the same AP. Surf to those links manually typing them in and it's fine.

Regarding my comment about the hidden wifi in my other comment. You'd think that the whole phone would have access to the wifi settings you'd setup and that connection manager would store these. It doesn't. Connection manager seems to be nothing to do with managing your connection setups. And when in another program that want net access and searches for APs. It's totally blind to the hidden WIFI you setup in connectivity. So you are unable to choose it from the options, so can't connect.

E-mails. Why the hell is the delete option in a sub menu a few scrolls away? It doesn't make sense.

I managed to get POP3 working ok, so maybe it's worth keeping for that and the long battery life. But I really don't know how other reviewers, who review mail for exchange, missed all these issues out. One reviewer stated "The Nokia Director said it's great for mail for exchange" and the reviewer believed him. Erm, that was a NOKIA Director that said that, so of course he's gonna big it up :o)

Anyway. Even if you don't use what I've stated above, I still don't believe the phone deserves the praise it's getting. The OS needs a lot more work before it gets any praise like this. It's made me think about just moving to a Windows Mobile platform phone or ditching smart phones altogether as they clearly don't agree with me :o)

Comment purephase said on 24th August 2008

Just got this handset on Vodafone contract (moved from N95 on T-Mobile. Those guys are really looking to give offers away at the moment. Got unlimited data, lots of calls/texts for under £30 a month after bargaining (so I save over £270 vs. an iphone).

First impression are very favourable:

Amazing build quality and slim profile
Lightening fast download speeds on 3.5G network
Robust OS - no crashes so far!

On down side the icons seem a little dated - but can probably update cosmetics.

In summary would agree with 10s across the board!

Comment DannyB said on 21st September 2008

Well i gotta say ive been so impressed with all the reviews ive trawled through recently and endless youtube vids on the E71 that ive ordered one, and will be arriving in two days time! lookin forward to getting my hands on it, and hoping it lives up to all the praise its recieved! WHO NEEDS AN IPHONE?! haha ill be re-visiting with my verdict later in the week

Comment NickH said on 17th November 2008

I have just got one and I would not give it quite this adulation. I am coming to this as a 6230i phone plus Windows Mobile PDA user. If you have never used a PDA/Smartphone before then I can imagine this will be a real trial. Even as a heavy PDA user I have found the menu difficult to fathom E.g. Bluetooth settings can be found in Connectivity-Bluetooth, Tools-Settings-General-Enhancement and Tools-Settings-Connection-Bluetooth. Sometimes you get to what looks like the same place but in one case there are extra tabs and the other not. It took me a couple of days before I noticed these extra tabbed pages showing in grey on a dark grey background at the top of some menus. And there is some weird stuff e.g "Device Manager" - about my carkit and heasdet right? No, this is about different "Server profiles" and Remote configuration and even though I work in IT I can't see what this is really about. It has a "Barcode Reader" duh why? Especially since I haven't been able to read a single barcode with it yet.
Here's an example from the manual to show how many levels of menu you sometimes have to wade through - "Menu > Tools > Settings > General > Security > Phone and SIM card > Keypad autolock period". And talking about the manual mine came with version 1 with 100 pages. There is version 2 on the Nokia site with 160 pages - an indication of how much extra explanation they have found necessary?
Some other gripes:-
No Games, not one! OK there are some free Symbian games but they are not easy to find and the ones I have found are rubbish. So to get decent games you have to pay.
There is no option to add voice tags for contacts. It cleverly works without you entering your own but if it won't recognise your voice then tough! If your friends with unusual spelling that the voice synthesizer can't work out like Letitia and Anatascia you will have to attempt to copy its version of pronunciation. If you have entries with similar names or 2 entries for the same person then again, hard luck!
It connects to my handsfree OK but sometimes when voice dialling (my bluetooth has no display) it says 'Dialling' but doesn't actually dial.
The camera is only average compared to some of my colleagues phones.
PC Suite does not let you do anything in the SMS 'My Folders' section. Neither the folders nor the messages are shown. This was all fine on my 6230i. Even the latest Beta version of the Nokia messages program "Nokia Communication Center 2.0" does not show them.
So can't quite see 10/10 ?

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