Nokia E71 Cell Phone Review - Battery Life

The Nokia E71's battery life was unimpressive for talk time and web browsing, a consequence of using the power hungry 3G network. Music playback time was very good. For more information about our battery tests see this article.

Call Time (4.80)
The Nokia E71 lasted four hours in our test of call time. This is not a particularly good time, you can see below that it falls below average and most of our comparison phones did better. The biggest impact on the battery life is the use of AT&T's battery hungry 3G network. You can see that the E71 performed better than the E66, which we tested using the same network, by dint of its larger battery, but it falls well short of the performance we got from the iPhone 3G, also tested on the same network. The Nokia E71's call time should be sufficient for those who make a small or moderate number of calls, but heavy callers will find it inadequate. You can extend the battery life significantly by using the EDGE network instead, although this will cost you in terms of data speeds and you won't be able to do simultaneous calls and data.

Call Time (min)

Music Playback (11.60)
The Nokia E71 performed very well in our music playback test, lasting sixteen hours seven minutes. This is amongst the best times we've seen from any device, and handily beats out all of our comparison phones. Given the limited talk time it's good to see that listening to music on the E71 won't drain your battery too much.

Music Playback Time(min)

Web Browsing (4.38)
In our web browsing test the Nokia E71 lasted three hours thirty-nine minutes. Once again the culprit is the battery hungry 3G network, with the addition of having the screen on for the entire test resulting in an even worse score. You can see below that only the Nokia E66 and its smaller battery performed worse on this test. Once again you can improve your battery performance by switching to the EDGE network, but this will result in a significant impact on browsing speeds.

Browsing Time (min)

Idle Time unscored
In order to ensure that we deliver reviews in a timely fashion we don't test idle time. Nokia's stated idle time for the E71 is up to 20 days.