Review: Nokia e61i

Recently my phone contract expired and I decided to go for something a little different this time. I liked the look of the Palm Treo and also the Nokia e61i. I checked them out on eBay and didn't really find one I liked the price of, so I decided to get one through my phone provider.

I've been pleasantly suprised. My current work phone (an iMate JasJam) is a great piece of kit. I venture to say that the e61i is at least as good - if not better. The 802.11 wireless is far better - it works with WPA2 and connects without problems. I have noticed that with a Netgear router it does have occasional problems - but then again, most PCs around the place have problems with that particular router.

As a phone it is more than adequate - I like the keypad very much. It has a nice tactile feel to it and I can type reasonably quickly on it. The location of various non-alpha keys confuses me sometimes, but that's to be expected when jumping between different keypads. It has a nice ear piece and I haven't had any problems with calls at all. It's a better phone than the JasJam.

As a PDA I find that it works very well too. But, I prefer the Windows Mobile approach to the Nokia Symbian approach (personal preference naturally). This is not to say it lacks functionality - it's just the aesthetics that I prefer. I've been happy with it's performance for note taking, task making, calendering etc so no complaints.

Battery life is good - I get about a week out of a charge - and this is with it checking my email hourly via wireless and various calls.

I was also pleasantly suprised by the music player bit of the phone. I find that creating playlists and the like is very easy and the sound quality out of the phone's speaker is quite decent.

OK, those were all good things. Here are a few tips on what *not* to do with this phone. Don't set it up with IMAP and gmail. I was completely locked out of my messages - SMS, MMS and emails. The fix? Reload the software. Ouch. Bye bye to all my phone numbers etc. I cried a bit but I got over it. That's probably my only complaint so far. It is a very wide phone too - which makes it hard to find a good case and occasionally makes me cranky when I'm lugging it about. Apart from this I have no further complaints at this time.

I haven't used the camera much and to be honest, don't expect anything special from *any* phone camera.

All in all, I'm very happy with it. It's a lovely compliment to my JasJam and fulfils my geeky requirements :-)