Nokia E71

The GSM based Nokia E71 ($483, without contract) is one of the company�s best designed smart phones. With multiple connectivity options (including 3G/HSDPA and Wi-Fi), a responsive QWERTY keypad, and a spectacular productivity suite, this is the smart phone to have if you're looking for uninterrupted email access.

The first thing you'll notice about the E71 is its size. Weighing 4.4 ounces, it's smaller and significantly thinner than both Apple's iPhone 3G and RIM's upcoming BlackBerry Bold, yet the E71's stainless steel casing keeps it from feeling flimsy. To reach those small dimensions, Nokia sent the E71's predecessor the E61 to the chopping block. The QVGA screen is now 2.36 inches rather than 2.8 likewise, the keypad is packed tightly together with virtually no spaces.

For a phone that relies so heavily on email, this was a bold move on Nokia's part, but it definitely pays off. It was difficult to type certain letter combinations on the tight keypad, but the keys were very responsive, and after a day of messaging we quickly adapted to them. Each key is also slightly raised, which makes it easy to distinguish between them.

On the productivity side, the E71 comes with Quickoffice, which offers Word, Excel, and PowerPoint like apps that are compatible with Microsoft Office.

We used Quickoffice to create a small text document, which we later edited on our PC using Microsoft Word.

The E71 also has Adobe Reader, a calculator, a built in dictionary, and a currency converter, which adds up to an impressive software package for such a tiny phone.

As for messaging, the E71 supports POP3/IMAP and Microsoft Exchange. For browsing, you can either take advantage of the phone's 3G capabilities or you can find and connect to a hotspot using the E71's built in Wi-Fi scanner. Unlike the iPhone 3G, the E71's built in browser supports Flash based content. Browsing with the phone's directional pad, however, was somewhat frustrating, since you can only move your cursor in four directions.

The E71 features a 3.2 megapixel camera with an LED flash, video recording capabilities, Assisted GPS, Bluetooth A2DP, a microSD slot for memory expansion (the E71 only has 110MB of internal memory), and Nokia's Music Store app, which lets you buy DRM protected WMA music files over the air. We transferred MP3 from our Windows Vista PC using Nokia's PC Suite, which is required for syncing the E71 with your Windows based PC (although enterprise mail syncs over the air).

Mac users can sync data manually using a Bluetooth connection, but we weren�t able to use Mac OS X�s iSync app to connect to the E71. When playing music, the E71's speaker was sufficiently loud, although the lack of a 3.5mm headphone jack keeps it from being a convenient replacement for your music player.

With heavy Web browsing, email, and voice calls, the E71's battery lasted us roughly two and a half days (Nokia rates a conservative battery life of 10 hours and 30 minutes for talk time, 17 days for standby, and 6.9 days for standby with Wi-Fi enabled), which is very impressive considering most users will not have Wi-Fi switched on as much as we did. Unfortunately, the battery cannot be charged via USB it requires Nokia's proprietary power connector.