Nokia E71

I have now owned my Sony Ericsson W880i for close to 18 months, that is a record, don't think I have ever had a phone last more than 1 year before I throw it out. The SE W800i (SE from now on) is different. One of the main reasons why I have kept that for so long is that I have not seen any better phone yet.

My phones need to take a lot of beating. I send a lot of sms every day, I look at my e-mail and go to certain web sites like to find the next bus home and gmail. My SE has done me quite well, and frankly is quite good. I just had started to panic, was I getting so old that I was getting complaisant ? Was I the old guy talking about vinyl records sounding better (who cares, the music matters). Was I the one still talking about how the games on the Commodore 64 totally beat todays games ? As for the games, they were great, but they don't age well.

Nope. There is just no phone that is clearly better than the old W880i. Sure there are higher prices phones from SE with better camera, but since I own a fantastic camera (12 MP) I only need it to take good instant photos and the W880i does so quite well.

Then you might ask, why switch ? if I find a better answer than "just because" or "duh, I needed to because of ... will get back to you on that", I will let you know.

Last year I got my hands on Nokia N73, I detest that phone. Any N73 phone that is not being recycled into jewelry right now should be. Every 3-4 weeks I get a Nokia N95 phone as a 24/7 on call phone. Good screen on that phone, but that is it. Louse keyboard, awful refresh rate, and even I could design better looking icons. The guy who designed the menus is a drunk, an alcoholic crack smoking idiot who should be designing cross word puzzles or any board games, not phones. I need to go at least 3 levels down to change my ring tone, if I can ever find that option again (still wondering why almost everyone with a Nokia phone has the same ring tone?, those that did change it only did it once and they also have the same ringtone).

Both Nokia and SE make these music phones, they are to be these really swell awesome players, still not as good as a 5 year old ipod. Just to name one thing, why is it difficult to know where you were last time when you listen to audiobook or podcast ? These things are hours and hours long, I don't want to know where I was last time, if I did that I could just as well read the book and not listen to it. Just this one feature is making me look like an idiot.

Why ? When I listen to music/podcast/audiobook on my iphone, I can't hear my phone. So I am the complete moron half a sleep on my twice a day hour long bus ride with earphones on and NOT ANSWERING his phone, making it ring out two or three times.

I would get an iPhone in a heart beat if Steve Jobs would want to sell it to me. Unfortunately he does not want to sell me the only phone that is actually better than my W880i. I do not want to do business with Netcom. I have nothing against Netcom, except I don't want to do business with them. I am happy where I am. I know I can get an iPhone and cancel the deal and pay some sum and get the phone, but for 5.400 norwegian kroner I can buy myself another server, or a fully loaded laptop with 13-15" screen, 250GB disk drive, DVD burner, 4 GB memory and so forth. So paying 5.400 for a phone is out of the question, at least up front, I don't mind paying 200 norwegian kr a month which include free minutes, and smses and free calls to my wife.

So I got myself an Nokia E71. Why did I get Nokia since I really think their other phones are so bad they should be melted into jewelry ? I thought it had this fantastic e-mail support since it is supposed to beat the Blackberry RIM/perl whatever and it has a full keyboard.

First impression, I like it. New look of the menus, still the same crack smoking vodka induced messed up menu system, but much faster overall than the N95. I have not tested to see if there is a better audio book support.
I can recommend the phone, I have ssh terminal client on it that works, I actually logged into my solaris box and created a new zone using just my phone, which is totally cool. Fonts are nice, not great but nice.

Only problem I see so far is that it takes 2 seconds from clicking on reply to sms/email until I can start typing, and it takes quite some time to actually send the mail.

I will see if switching the memory card will do anything.

Conclusion so far (will/might change). My W880i is better phone but I will keep the E71 for some time longer due to larger screen and ssh client and it doesn't hurt that the phone actually works and syncs with no problems or extra cost with my Mac.

I might change back, but not today.

Nokia, if you want to hire me to redesign your phones and make them so much better, contact me.