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Smartphones Nokia Smartphones Nokia E61 | Nokia E61 |
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Contents Introduction
Which SmartPhone’s testing of the Nokia E61 has been a long-term affair, and thus this review earns the WSP "monster" badge of honour. Having used this phone every day now for six months, I can comfortably attest to the E61 being a great accomplishment by Nokia. Looking through the specifications of the E61 it seems as if Nokia’s philosophy for connectivity and capability was simply “include everything”. It’s a philosophy that has produced one of the best and most competitive smartphones to date. Briefly, it’s a quad band, 3G capable, Symbian driven smartphone with bluetooth, infrared, Wi-Fi, USB (via Nokia pop-port), Push-to-talk and VoIP over WLAN smartphone, with stereo audio and video support as well as a mini SD expansion slot (the unit comes supplied with an additional 64 Mb card). Besides the impressive specifications, a first glance at the E61 unit itself yields two prominent features that are hard not to notice.
The second feature of the phone to jump right out at you is the full (QWERTY) keyboard, with neat, tactile and quiet buttons. The keyboard combines with a centrally located five-way navigation joystick, with two buttons on either side that access the main OS menu and the mail and messaging functions. Two soft buttons (software and user defined) sit above the conventional green and red phonecall buttons. A blue function key on the lower left hand corner of the keyboard accesses secondary functions on the keys (marked in blue) and the entire keyboard is pleasantly backlit with white light. The phone can thus be used in total darkness. The unit weighs 144 grams with battery and its size is 117 x 69.7 x 15 (tapering) millimetres. Not one of the smallest phones on the market, but significantly smaller than many smartphones, as well as the phone’s direct target of competition in the form of RIM’s Blackberry. The E61 shares with the RIM devices a somewhat similar form factor (which Nokia designates as "monoblock"), and the landscape screen and full QWERTY keyboard give the phone some width compared to the common candy-bar format phone. However, the E61 provides a considerably thinner experience than the present Blackberry one. The phone is actually only 15 millimetres thick at it's thickest point which is at the top of the phone. It tapers off at the base of the phone to roughly 11 millimetres. Even Blackberry's 2007 releases do not manage this. The 8800 is a constant 14mm in thickness; the Pearl is 15mm. These RIM products are an improvement on their earlier models, but they’re still not as lithe as the E61. The compact tapering form of the E61 is evidenced more in its displacement figure than in other dimensions, which is 108cc. After using the E61 for a period I am convinced that this property of thinness is a most crucial one for a phone’s ergonomics. The E61 can slide into most pockets without creating any discomfort or bulging, and is hence easier to live with than many overall smaller phones that are thicker: the I-mate JasJam springs to mind as one such phone. The reason for the width is, of course, the large screen and full, adequately spaced QWERTY keys, and that is perhaps more than enough justification for many users to tolerate the increased width. However, this wider form factor does have another ergonomic benefit, in that the whole phone is more like the shape of the average pocket: more so than some much smaller block or candy bar format phones that have greater height and hence stick out of some pockets. Phones such as the Sony Ericsson M600i, Samsung Blackjack or Treo 680/750 are less wide, but they do so at some expense to both keyboard and screen. It's a physical trade-off that is going to be hard for manufacturers to overcome, until pull-out e-ink screens and laser keyboards are de rigeur. Until then, phones such as the E61, Blackberrys, and I-mate JAQ series could well be the most practical phone formats for many smartphone users. The phone comes in a suprisingly robust and good looking silver finish. The outer hull is clad with a combination of silver plastic and a magnesium alloy, which contributes to both strength and light weight. The unit feels sturdy… and after six months of use, there have been no unwelcome surprises in the form of parts going missing or not fitting properly. Rather than supplement the phone with any covering, I decided that “going naked” was the best option. This strategy of having no cover means that you can appreciate the good looks of the phone without anything obscuring it, and there are no encumbrances that slow down your interaction with it. It’s riskier for the phone, but a better test of its durability as well. The sturdiness of the E61 became all too clear to me after a few episodes of carelessness. For example, I inadvertantly let fly with the phone in the midst of the upward arm-swing of a rapid walk. The phone launched upwards before answering the call of gravity, whereupon it landed on the hard polished indoor tiles of a shopping centre. The E61 survived this more than reasonable velocity and at least a 1.5 metre arcing fall without any discernable scratch. Another encounter, this time between my left hand grasping the phone and a perfectly placed hand railing, saw the hand travelling in one direction and the phone in the other. The phone landed on a pebble-concrete surface and sustained only a couple of minute scratches on the lower left corner. A few other drops from hand height to mostly rough surfaces have occurred within the six months and the phone has sustained no other marks besides these few, barely noticeable scratches. Put it down to either paranormally good luck or a remarkably strong finish. The phone's light reasonably light weight may help, but I have dropped lighter phones much more gently and they have come off far worse. Incidentally, the E61 operationally never looked troubled in the slightest by these falls, and my guess is you would really have to do something drastic like smash it against a wall or drive over it, in order to create any functional problem through physical shock. With a smartphone of such capability it is often easy to forget the original raison d’etre of the unit: the humble telephone call. Sometimes this is hard to discern because of variations in carrier services, but generally the GSM call quality of the E61 is very good, and it was noticeable on more than one occasion that the phone pulled in reliable signals where some other phones on the same network at the same location and time were experiencing drop outs. In six months of being often confronted with this comparative situation, it was never experienced the other way around. In making a telephone call from the standby screen, the qwerty keypad automatically works on numeric mode. A number of other applications also automatically access the same kind of function so that you don’t have to fiddle with alpha-numeric selection. This auto-detect of numeric input can be overriden with the function key. The phone doesn't auto-filter your contacts when you start to dial a number, like Windows Mobile does. But if you know an entry is in the phonebook, it is a simple matter to go to contacts (you can set a soft key for quick access) and then enter the initial letter(s) which will filter and display the relevant names. The hands-free loudspeaker on the unit is relatively very loud. Given the tiny size of the speakers, it is nevertheless of good quality, and during the entire review period I never experienced distortion with it. Ringtones are totally customisable and utilise the phone's more than ample audio capabilities. Push to talk is supported (if carrier supported), as is VoIP. Voice Over Internet Protocol (VoIP) VoIP over Wi-Fi is suitably catered for if you are in a business or home environment, and the voice quality is excellent. E61 users have reported on forums that E61 VoIP seems much better than available softphones—but this could be an artifact caused by those people using substandard microphones or speakers on their PCs, because services such as Skype can provide a very high quality call. The setup is more awkward if you want to auto-connect to open hotspots as you must create a new profile for every new hotspot, or use an aftermarket program like ParkWiFi to connect. Public hotspots often have a web page that must be passed before they will allow a phone to route traffic anyway, and so other factors make this a less than automatic, but obtainable feat. The E61 internet telephony application that comes with V3.x of the firmware alleviates the need for third party software such as ParkWiFi. This firmware supports STUN and persistent TCP/IP for NAT firewall traversal which--in English--means that the VoIP is not limited to LAN. Connectivity  Searching for Wi-Fi points with the e61 The phone can connect to USB via Nokia PC Suite mode, but also as a mass storage device (so that you can use the E61 miniSD as flash memory). You have to remove the battery cover in order to access the mini SD card, but this is not too much trouble for the added protection. The card is hot swappable. The included web browser is an excellent product, and I never felt the need to revert to the Opera mini browser that I had installed, “just in case”. Quite simply, the browser offers a superior browsing experience to anything else in the mobile arena. A great feature of the browser is a zoom-out page preview that pops up as a small bordered graphic, to let you know where you are on a page. Another feature of the browser gives you a "close to tabbed" browsing experience: simply hit the "back" soft key and you get a filmstrip of thumbnails of the pages that you have browsed in your immediate history. RSS feeds are easily subscribed to, bookmarking capabilities are easily accessed and powerful, and goto url supports a filter feature, just like a desktop browser. The phone can communicate at 384 kbps 3G rates and it fetches pages at a tolerable speed through this mode, if the network is performing to its' specifications. Using Wi-Fi 802.11g with a really fast link is a pleasingly different world, and of course gives a much more rapid browsing and download experience—and it's great for high quality audio streaming of overseas radio stations and podcasts.  easy icon driven access to features The E61 operates on the popular Symbian platform and is equipped with the latest version, 9.1 or Series 60 3rd edition. This is a robust and secure operating system that is easy to navigate, and though quite new, is already gathering a considerable wealth of third-party programs. Coupled with javascript support, this is a very versatile phone open to many software possibilities. The test phone had a versatile array of programs installed, from movie viewers and aftermarket music players through to dictionaries and language translators, .pdf and .prc bookreaders, an office suite, a database program, and even a biorhythm program. All worked smoothly and without a hitch, though some of the java programs took a little time to load. The many connectivity features of the phone (mentioned in the initial paragraph of this review) are utilised well within the new Symbian 9.1 Operating System. Symbian (of which Nokia is a majority shareholder) has been a good partner to uphold the long held Nokia tradition of good user interfaces, and the OS is quite easy and intuitive to navigate through and customise. There has been a relative lack of people on the E61 forums asking questions about how to locate items--perhaps due to the ease with which things are usually found. One item that did seem to catch people out was an item set by default to block out the installation of all software that has not been 'signed' with Symbian: but this is easily found and changed in the application manager settings. Another exception is the command to display the elapsed time during a telephone call, which I found somewhat less than intuitively placed as it is not found in phone settings or call settings, but rather in the phone logs section. The bottom line, though, is that this phone is not a bad choice for those who hate reading a manual.
 The e61 is competent for push & pull email Nokia initially released this phone with firmware 1.x, and it is testimony to the stability of the operating system that this editor continued to use the initial version for almost the entire test period rather than upgrade the firmware to versions 2.x or 3.x. Some owners experienced difficulty when their email inboxes were too large with the version 1.x, but this review phone had no problem on 1.x firmware with hundreds of emails in the root inbox folder, and many more in the user customised mail folders. The native mail program on the review unit worked very well and I found it more than adequate for handling different pop & IMAP email accounts. The E61 supports all corporate push email solutions like blackberry connect, exchange activesync and Nokia business centre. For most of the E61's time on the market, the audio playing software supplied with the phone has been somewhat limited. Firmware 1.x was a very basic player with little control. A particularly annoying volume reset bug haunted many users on firmware 2.x. The native audio still has limited volume control of 10 increments, and at firmware 1.x the 1/10 setting simply wasn't low enough in volume when in a quiet space: However, the latest firmware is a marked improvement. Firmware 3.x also gives editing capability over the preset equaliser settings, and this makes the actual act of listening to music far better as you can adjust to suit taste, ambient noise and the headphones you use. Aftermarket Software Possibilities
Aftermarket software choices are a fairly personal thing, but by far the most useful program I used on the phone was MobiReader, available for free from MobiPocket.com. It is an extremely useful program for the avid reader and I found that reading on the phone was much more pleasurable with this software than trying to navigate through .pdfs. Reading Adobe Acrobat documents is also a hit and miss affair, as memory problems tend to arise with anything bigger than about a 1.5 Mb document, causing a program abort and read error. Mobireader will convert .pdfs to a .prc text format that can then be displayed in any font size you choose, and it is bliss for reading to set the screen to a (variable speed) autoscroll. Another program worth mentioning (as some E61 owners love the phone just for this reason): Putty is available for the Symbian, and works well with the wide screen. It is a program that allows a user to access servers from anywhere for administration, and can give access to many remote command line applications. Since the E61 is so friendly in connectivity terms, it would be remiss of Nokia not to build adequate security in to the phone. On top of the Wi-Fi WEP and WPA support mentioned, the phone has some nifty inbuilt features such as a phone lock that can be triggered remotely by SMS if your phone goes missing. The mini SD card is also code lockable, but on the earliest version of the firmware this resulted in some problems with apps gaining access to the card on initial boot--a problem rectified with v2.x+ of the firmware. Such controls are not as comprehensive as those that can be found with aftermarket software such as those from Mobi-Data, but they are a step in the right direction. The phone lock is easily accessed from the main Nokia power switch menu of the phone, and I found it so accessible and useable that I chose to use this feature in place of the conventional keyboard lock. (Those aquainted with Nokia phones will be familiar with the usual candybar format phone keyboard lock that is accessed by simultaneously pressing an upper left (or menu) and lower left button of a Nokia phone.) The keyboard still locks using the full phone lock, but there is the added protection of a phone that only you can unlock, whenever you are not directly using the phone.
The first noticeable deficit of the E61 is that it has no camera (a situation that is addressed in Nokia’s recently announced next attraction, the 2 megapixel equipped E61i). The E61 is in good company here, as it shares this lack of camera with many of the RIM Blackberry series smartphones. It’s a move that is intended to be an advantage in the corporate arena, where taking any kind of handheld camera into the bowels of an intellectual-property rich corporate environment may not be permitted. (At least that's how the story goes.) Given that many people find the current level of photo technology in most phones is inferior to a dedicated digital device, and that a phone on a camera is little more than a novelty, this may be an omission that is easy to accept for the vast majority of smartphone owners. At the moment most phones are hard pushed to give a 3 megapixel shot, and auto-focus (rather than fixed focus) lens are almost non-existent (example of exceptions at the time of writing: Nokia N93/N93i/N95). Compensating for the E61's lack of camera, photos can easily be transferred to the device via any of a number of methods offered by this connectivity rich phone, and so many owners will experience little disadvantage. The phone is 3G and can still make video calls and receive a video call from another party, whilst sending any image that you choose back to the other phone. For some users (probably the majority, from available market research data) this may indeed be preferable to a conventional two-way video call in any case.
Nokia persists in supplying only the proprietary pop-port for headphone use. This is an awkward and sometimes unreliable method of connection. It would have been nice to see an industry standard 2.5/3.5mm stereo jack for headphones, which would save owners some trouble. Indeed, Nokia actually does this on recent models which are marketed on their music playing capabilities: and this phone's target market of business users might see the audio features of this phone as a frill more than a necessity. With the review phone, I used a Nokia stereo headset and had little trouble aside from the odd crackling connection, which could usually be rectified to restore stability with a tweak of the pop port connection. There is a Nokia adapter available to convert the pop-port to a standard jack, but you still have to live with the pop-port, as well as the cumbersome adapter. To be fair, a 2.5 or 3.5 mm jack can also be vulnerable to connection problems, depending on the quality of connectors used. Some owners have also complained of audio player volume reset problems with the version 2.x firmware, but this has since been rectified in version 3.x (along with an increase in the unit's general operating speed). The phone is slow on initial booting, but once it is booted there is little noticeable lag, even when running multiple applications. The main menu button to the left of the joystick also doubles as a toggle between applications similar to a windows PCs' <ctrl-alt> shortcut. Holding down the button continuously for a second is met with a small vertically orientated window that pops up, with the currently running applications displayed as easily accessible icons in the window. As already noted, some delay can be experienced on the booting of javascript based programs. Numerous bloggers and forum posters have stated that the phone is fast, and it is hard to disagree. The battery in the E61 is a BP-5L 1500mAh unit and it provides good operating time to the phone. Nokia claims the BP-5L will provide up to 11 days of standby time. In practice, the phone needed to be charged every second evening, when used with a medium level of use including about half an hour's talk per day, as well as roughly half an hour of 3G browsing and much application use. Turning off features when they are unused (such as auto scan for networks and bluetooth) will noticeably increase the battery life. Other General Use Features worth Mentioning The power switch discussed above (in 'security') also accesses an offline/flight mode, so that you can have all of the phone's features without incurring the wrath of airline or hospital staff. The switch also quickly accesses preset profiles (as is customary on Nokia phones, be they smart or feature phones). .  The standby screen can display seven most-used programs You can select the screensaver to display an entire calendar as well as the time and date, with a bonus feature of a neat little application called handy clock. This is an alternative program to the firmware clock, and it is aesthetically better but not functionally too different. Some users complain of awkwardness with the keyboard or joystick, but I never noticed any problems. The E61 could perhaps benefit from the commonly implemented side scrolling wheel/back key of the Blackberry, but I did not miss it. The joystick is perhaps a little on the hard side, and there may be slight differences in tension between different units. That's the only thing that I can think of that would explain some user's strong sentiments against the joystick. If they want a poor joystick, they should try something like a Sony K810 where the joystick is too deep to be depressed properly, irrespective of the user's finger size. Or for keyboard difficulty, try any one of the smartphones that puts a QWERTY keyboard in a less wide package. In relative terms, the E61 controls are a breeze. A pet annoyance with the operability of the phone is the inability to reduce the screen brightness to a very dim level for night operation. Given that the keyboard is nicely backlit for the purpose, it would be better to have a wide array of control over the screen for different situations. The phone is well balanced and can be operated comfortably in one hand. The little brother of the E61, Nokia’s E62, is one of the ways that Nokia hopes to penetrate into the lucrative US market for smartphones, which is currently dominated by RIM and Palm Treo (Together they hold about 70% of the U.S. market). The E62 is a cut-down version of the E61 which lacks wi-fi connectivity and W-CDMA (UMTS) 3G support, but comes at a carrier subsidised contract-bound price of around US $150. This is a clever move on Nokia’s part and might well be enough to get the attention of the U.S. public, who are well accustomed to not having to tolerate large initial premiums on a mobile phone. The E61 thankfully shares its little brother's price competitiveness. In Australia the E61 can be had in a number of ways, but one of the best is via a Three capped plan where it is $22 month for 24 months on a $29 cap. The full non-subsidised RRP of the E61 is AU $749 –also a very competitive outright price in the current smartphone market, given that the E61 is a device that often offers more features and better delivery of those features than the more expensive competition. Pro's:
Con's:
During the review period, I submitted a post to a very popular Symbian community web forum stating how good I thought the E61 was. This was something of an irregular thing to do, because almost every post that you see in such forums is a grumble or a tech support issue being hashed out. The post was fairly inundated with responses from like minded E61 (and 62) owners, all eager to put in their two cents worth about why the phone was so good. Many of them were US owners who had been previous or concurrent owners of Treos. Nokia is clearly on to a winner with the E61, and it looks as if products like those of the E series will almost certainly eat into Palm's & RIMs substantial hold over the US smartphone market. The E61 is a highly competent and compact (by virtue of its thin and short aspect) smartphone, with a presently unbeatable connectivity and a very friendly user interface. The form factor is excellent and provides for large screen and full keyboard whilst remaining totally pocketable. It’s a personal thing, but the monoblock remains my optimum choice of phone configuration. If you want an intelligent device that serves your internet, email, SMS/MMS, telephone, books and movies to you with style and ease, this phone must be a serious contender. Of course, those who specifically want a phone with a camera or two-way videoconferencing features need to look elsewhere, but many will not be put off by this omission. As an audio playing phone, the E61 could well serve the purpose, and it proved adequate for this reviewer: but you may have to contend with Nokia’s sometimes unreliable pop-port interface for the headphones, and you will probably want an aftermarket audio player. Nokia’s choice to put the latest Symbian OS in the phone was a wise one and will ensure that no end of applications are available for the E61, and the speed of operation of the unit will only help to fulfil the vast array of tasks which can be accomplished. Well done, Nokia.
Available from Nokia as a .pdf (click here) General Quad-Band Operation • GSM 850/900/1800/1900 and WCDMA 2100 (3GPP Release 99) networks in Europe, Africa, Asia-Pacific, North America, and South America where these networks are supported • Automatic switching between bands • Speech codecs: AMR, FR and EFR, NB-AMR Size • Weight: 144 g (with Nokia Battery BP-5L) • Dimensions: 117 mm x 69.7 mm x 14 mm at grip, 108 cc • Form: monoblock Memory Functions • Up to 64 MB of fixed user data memory • Expandable memory: 64 MB miniSD card, MultiMediaCardHot swap slot for easy MMC card insertion and removal Display and User Interface Display • Active matrix display • Supports up to 16 million colors • Adjustable display brightness and contrast control • Ambient light sensor for keypad display lighting control Navigation • Two soft keys with five-way joystick, power key can be used as profile key • Configurable right and left soft keys • Input method: full keyboard • Active standby enables user to configure 7 applications for fast access • Symbian operating system OS 9.1 Series 60, 3rd edition Messaging and Imaging Multimedia Messaging (MMS) • Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS, ver. 1.2) for text, voice clips, video clips and still images receiving, editing and sending • Distribution list Email and Messaging • Email client for connecting to personal and business email • Supports POP, IMAP (with idle) and SMTP protocols and MS Active Sync • Settings via OMA Client Provisioning, OMA Device Management • Supported third party email clients: Intellisync Wireless Email, Visto email technology, BlackBerry Connect, Goodlink and Seven Always-On Mail1 • Attachments viewers and editors support the most common features of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel (Microsoft Office 97, 2000, XP abd 2003). Compatible with Zip Manager and Adobe Reader2 • Instant Messaging client (Yahool, AOL, OMA) • SMS distribution list Enhanced Voice Features • Voice dialing, voice commands for menu short cuts, keypad lock and profiles • Enhanced voice commands (SIND) • Dedicated voice key for easy use of voice recording, voice dialing, and Push to Talk Connectivity and Data Transfer Connectivity • Pop-Port™ interface • USB port full speed supported via Pop-Port™ • Remote and local (peer-to-peer) synchronization over Bluetooth technology, IR, cable • Bluetooth wireless technology 1.2 • HTML browsing with Nokia Browser • Video and audio streaming (GPP and RealMedia: Real Video and Real Audio • WCDMA (GPP Release 99) • Multiconnectivity • WLAN connection can be shared by multiple applications at the same time. For example: email, browser and synchronization. • Possible to use WLAN, Bluetooth technology, USB and infrared at the same time. • Maximum six Bluetooth technology connections in use at the same time. Note: only one for Bluetooth wireless connectivity for audio. Data Transfer • EGPRS (Class B, MSC 11) • GPRS (General Packet Radio Service) Multislot Class 11 • GSM Circuit-Switched Data up to 14.4 and 43.2 (HSCSD) kbps Advanced Device Management • Application Management enables the delivery and management of native Symbian and Java ™ add-on applications over OMA DM. • Customization enables the delivery and management of terminal user interface elements over OMA DM. • Terminal Management Security includes security model, which enables protecting device data via device wipe and device lock management, protecting service usage by ensuring that right settings are in place. Services • Nokia Access: Receive world-class support for your Nokia E61 and specified client software. Nokia Access for Business Devices provides support at a predictable annual cost, focusing on issues specific to enterprise businesses. • Nokia Pro Pack Call Management • Push to Talk • Internet call over WLAN • Voice dialing • Speed dialing: Up to 8 names • Automatic redial (max 10 attempts) • Call waiting, call hold, call divert, call timer • Automatic and manual network selection • Caller identification with image • The name of the calling party (spoken caller line identification) is mixed with the ringing tone. The functionality is enabled/disabled through profile settings. • Fixed dialing number, allows calls only to predefined numbers • Conference call capability (up to 6 participants) • Vibrating alert • Integrated handsfree speaker Other Useful Features • Personal shortcuts • Customizable profiles • Alarm clock • Music Player (MP/AAC) • Notepad for short notes • Automatic key guard • Calculator Power Management Battery: Nokia Battery BP-5L Capacity: 1500 mAh Talk time: GSM Up to 4.3 - 9.5 hours WCDMA Up to 2.2 - 5.0 hours VoIP Up to 4.4 - 4.6 hours Standby time: GSM Up to 13 - 17 days WCDMA Up to 13 - 19 days GSM/WCDMA and WLAN Up to 8 - 9.5 days
1 The availability of the product, characteristics, features and supported solutions depends on your area, 2 Adobe reader and Zip manager software available in MMC
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