Nokia E71 Cell Phone Review - Software

Running Symbian S60 the Nokia E71 is a fully featured smart phone with the ability to install native third party applications. The web browsers is amongst the best we've seen on a mobile device, including support for Flash content.

OS (8.0)
The Nokia E71 runs Symbian Series 60 (S60) version 3 feature pack 1. Symbian S60 is a powerful smart phone operating system that gives users an incredible amount of functionality out of the box and the ability to extend these capabilities via native third party software. S60 uses a standard phone interface with a D-Pad and soft keys to get around. Obviously being more complex means that there are some differences, for example there are shortcuts throughout the interface that you will need to learn, for example the backspace key will often allow you to delete the currently selected item and holding down the home button will show you all the currently running program. These features will take awhile to learn, so there's a steeper learning curve with S60 than with a standard cell phone, but this is generally true of all smart phone platforms. Our biggest issue with S60 is that menus tend to be overly large and heavily nested, making getting to some functions difficult. Our score for S60 is standardized.

Home Screen Score (8.0)
The Nokia E71's home screen is the typical Active Standby display found on most S60 devices. At the top of the screen are indicators for time, signal strength and battery life. To the right of the clock is a line of six user customizable application shortcuts. Beneath these are various plugins that give you quick access and information about various features like the calendar, search, email and Wi-Fi. Only five of these can be shown at any one time, however, so sometimes you expect to see a plugin and cannot, such as when music is playing in the background.

At the bottom of the screen are shortcuts for alerts, so if you have a voicemail or missed alert you will see indicators here that you can activate to view those items. Finally at the very bottom of the screen are the labels for the two soft keys. By default these are assigned to Menu and Camera, but they are user-customizable so you can assign them to anything you want. The background of the home screen can be reassigned to any image on the device you want. All of these are typical S60 functions, but the E71 also has a new feature that we first saw on the E66 and seems to be specific to Nokia's E-Series devices, the mode switcher.

This feature allows you to switch between two different home screens. You can customize the theme/background, applications and plugins for each home screen separately. By default the application switches between personal and work mode, but you can choose any two modes you want and customize them to your needs. This could be a big boon for users who really do live in two separate worlds and want a different home screen interface when you move between them. This makes an already flexible and powerful home screen even more so.

Extensibility (8.0)
Running the powerful Symbian S60 operating system means that the Nokia E71 allows you to download and install native third party applications to extend the capabilities of the phone. There's also native support for Java applications like Opera Mini. This combination makes the E71 one of the most flexible phones on the market in terms of extensibility.

Customizability (8.0)
Symbian S60 on the Nokia E71 gives you a plethora of customization options. We've already discussed all of the home screen customizations, in addition to this you can rearrange the icons in the applications menu, including the ability to create your own folders to organize items. You can reassign the function of the contacts, calendar and messaging keys, a nice feature that we've been looking for on S60 devices for awhile. You can also change the global font size to one of three sizes and choose various themes that change the look and feel of the interface. All of these put together make the E71 a very customizable device.

OS Responsiveness (7.0)
We found the Nokia E71's operating system to be very responsive, we encountered no major crashes while using the phone and most items load quickly, with a couple of notable exceptions like the music program. In addition the E71, like most modern S60 devices, has double the RAM of previous phones, which means the out of memory errors that plagued phones like the original N95 are no longer an issue.

Browser Features (11.0)
S60 Web is one of the most powerful mobile web browsers on any device. It can handle most web technologies including full HTML page and mobile WAP pages. It also support Javascript, Flash (limited), Frames, RSS and Atom feeds, images, saving web pages, encryption, cookies and password management. About the only thing it doesn't support is Java. Several of these features like password management and Flash are hard to find on any other mobile web browser, including other advanced browsers like the iPhone 3G's Safari.

Browsing Interface (9.5)
Web's browsing interface is very good. Pages are rendered as they appear on your computer's web browser with a clever overview and zoom in feature that Nokia calls Mini-Map. Just hit the number 8 to get an overview of the page, move the box to the place you want to zoom in on and press the center select key to zoom in on that section. It's not quite as elegant as Safari's double tap to zoom system, but it works well in its own right.

Bookmarks on the E71 are very powerful, with the ability to edit existing bookmarks, organize them into folders and a nice feature called Auto Bookmarks that saves the URL's of all the pages you've visited for quick access later. The history feature while browsing is also very nice as going back to a previous page takes you to a thumbnail view of all your previous pages so you can see where you're going.

The menu system in Web is unfortunately huge and complicated. There are multiple sub menus so finding exactly what you want can be something of a pain. Thankfully there are keypad shortcuts for some commonly used functions, like the aforementioned number 8 for the Mini-Map. Despite the large menu we still consider Web to be one of the most comfortable mobile web browsers on the market. You can really get a desktop browsing experience with little in the way of compromises.

Browser Access (10.0)
It took us four steps to browse to our own site on the Nokia E71. There's a shortcut for Web right on the home screen, so we just had to move over to the shortcut and press in on the D-pad to launch the browser. Once there we just typed in our address, counted as a single step, and then hit go. You can see below that the Nokia E71's performance is significantly better than average and as good as any of our comparison phones. We use steps for this test instead of a timed test because we don't want network issues to interfere.

Steps to Browse to Wirelessinfo.com

Gaming (5.0)
The Nokia E71 doesn't come with a single full version game, which is a shame. The D-Pad is responsive and easy to use, so it should be fine for playing mobile games on the device. There are a wide variety of native third party games for S60 devices, and you can also install Java games. The E71 does not support Nokia's N-Gage gaming service, however.

Calculator (5.0)
The calculator on the Nokia E71 is the typical s60 calculator, which gives you access to basic functions and a couple of extras like square root and percentages, but that's about it.

Alarm (5.0)
The Nokia E71's alarms are built into the Clock application. You can create multiple alarms and there is support for recurrence, although you're limited to a couple of pre-built patterns so you can't create your own complex recurrence pattern.

Document Software (7.0)
The Nokia E71 has the full version of Quickoffice installed, which allows you to both view and edit Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents. You can also view PDF documents using the built in Adobe PDF viewer.

Other Software (4.0)
In addition to the software we discuss above there are a few other pieces of software we consider worth additional points. Nokia Maps 2.0 gives users local search, maps, direction (voice guided for an extra fee) and integrates with the phone's GPS. The search program allows you to search for almost anything on your phone and search online at the same time. This is an incredibly powerful tool and we're very impressed by it. There's also a file browser so you can manage the files on your device. Finally there's built in support for SIP VOIP services, so you can use the E71 as a voice over IP device right out of the box.