Nokia E71 Cell Phone Review - Multimedia

The Nokia E71's music software was slow to load, but once you have it up it's a very capable music playback device. We were also happy at the excellent range of video types supported, but it did have trouble with high bitrate videos.

Accessing Music Software (3.77)
The Nokia E71 took an average of 5.3 seconds to start playing music. This is not a very impressive time, despite being slightly better than average. You can see below that several of our comparison phones have it beat out, although at least it's faster than the Nokia E66.

We were slowed down in this test by the fact that there's no shortcut to the music application on the home screen, so we had to go in through the menu system. The music application itself took several seconds to load once we did get to it. You can speed up this time a bit by adding the music program to your home screen. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

Time to Start Music (sec)

Dedicated Music Controls (1.5)
When music is playing on the Nokia E71 you can control volume with the volume keys, of course. You also get a plugin on the home screen that shows you what is currently playing and gives you quick access to the music player, but there are so many plugins there already that it doesn't show up unless you switch to personal mode, as such we are only awarding half points for it. There are no other dedicated music controls on the phone, not surprising given that it's a business oriented device.

Music Software Functionality and Organization (8.8)
The S60 music software found on the Nokia E71 is very good. You can view your music by title, artist, album, genre or composer. There is also support for playlists, including the ability to modify and create playlists on the device. One of the features we like most is the search, if you're looking at a long list of artists or songs you can search through it just by typing on the QWERTY. Tags for Mp3, AAC and WMA files were all recognized correctly.

Album art is supported, but only if it is embedded in the file, if you have the art sitting in the folder with the file it won't be displayed. Background play is supported as is an equalizer with presets and the abilty to create your own. What isn't supported are visualizations or ratings, and it is a bit fiddly to get to the music player from the home screen by default, see above for more on that. Overall, however, we consider the S60 music player to be well organized and powerful, giving users almost all the features they want.

Online Song Downloading (0.0)
Nokia still has not launched their direct download music service in the United States, and as the E71 is an unlocked device you won't have access to carrier services.

Streaming (0.0)
The Nokia E71 was unable to play any of our test streaming audio files in Mp3, Real or Windows Media format.

Podcast Support (7.0)
Like most modern S60 devices the E71 has Nokia's excellent podcasting application built in. You can subscribe to podcasts right on the device and have them update on a schedule of your choosing. There's even integration with the music software, so you don't have to open a different application to access them. This is amongst the best podcasting software on any mobile device, we wish that other manufacturers would take a cue from Nokia and add support for podcasts to their phones.

Music Sync with PC (7.0)
The Nokia E71 can synchronize music with your Windows computer using either Nokia's PC Suite software or directly with Windows Media Player. If you're on a Mac you will need to download Nokia's Multimedia Transfer application to get support for iTunes synchronization.

Music Formats and DRM (4.0)
The Nokia E71 can play back Mp3, AAC and WMA music files, and it can play back WMA files protected by Microsoft's DRM. Such files can be purchased from various online retailers like Napster.com.

Music Interruption (10.0)
The Nokia E71 does a very good job when music playback is interrupted by an incoming call. The music is paused when the phone begins to ring and then starts up again when the call ends. About the only thing we could have wished for is a nicer fade in/out effect as on the iPhone 3G.

Video Software Access (3.70)
It took us an averge of 5.4 seconds to get a video playing on the Nokia E71. This is a reasonably fast time, especially when you consider that the gallery application where you go to view videos is buried in the menu system.

You can see below that the E71's time is faster than average and amongst our comparison phones only the Palm Centro beat it out (the iNokia E66G tied). If you add a shortcut to the gallery on your home screen you'll speed up this time even more. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

Time to Start Video (sec)

Video Controls (4.0)
When video is playing on the Nokia E71 your video playback controls are unintuitive at best. First of all there are three ways to stop video from playing, the left soft key pauses it, the right soft key stops it and the center select key on the D-Pad, pauses it. We don't know why there's a need to waste three buttons on almost exactly the same function, but hey maybe they were reaching since some buttons, like left/right on the D-Pad, do absolutely nothing. Up/down on the D-Pad will fast forward and rewind your clip and the volume keys do their thing of course.

Video Software & Organization (1.0)
We've been berating Nokia about the terrible Realplayer software that's used for video playback on their S60 devices for quite awhile, and we will continue to complain until this terrible, terrible piece of software goes the way of the Dodo. In the meantime I guess we should explain whey it's terrible. The Realplayer application itself has very poorly laid out controls, see above, and no software management features whatsoever. You can also get at your videos via the Gallery program, which allows you to do things like create folders to organize your videos, but there's nothing anywhere close to the excellent automatic recognition of tags and sorting feature that we see in Nokia's music application.

Video Sync with PC (7.0)
As with music you can synchronize music between the Nokia E71 and your Windows computer using either Nokia's PC Suite or Windows Media Player. On the Mac side you'll need Nokia's mac software to synchronize with iTunes.

Video Formats (7.0)
The Nokia E71 was able to play back a very good selection of video types including Mpeg-4, 3GP, H264, Real Media and Flash video. It wasn't able to handle Windows Media or Quicktime video.

Video DRM (0.0)
The Nokia E71 does not support any major form of video DRM, including Apple's iTunes DRM or Microsoft's DRM. This means you won't be able to purchase videos protected with these forms of DRM to watch on your E71.

Video Playback Smoothness (4.0)
We were disappointed that the Nokia E71 was only able to play back two of our video test files, with a maximum bitrate of 112kbps. This is likely due to the lack of processor power, and falls short of what we were able to manage with Nokia's high end consumer oriented devices like the Nokia N82.

Online Video Downloading (0.0)
The Nokia E71 doesn't provide direct download of premium video content to the device.

Video Streaming unscored
We don't score this section as streaming mobile video is not standardized. We do test a few sites for your information, however. Like other modern S60 devices the Nokia E71 is capable of streaming full flash video from Youtube.com, however the processor can't really keep up with it. We recommend you stick with the mobile version of Youtube, which the E71 also supports. Streaming Windows Media video was not supported.