As promised, it’s time to review my new Nokia E61i smartphone. Before I get into details, I got some things to mention in front.
First of all, this is my first smartphone, so I’m not expert on smartphones or PDA-s in any means, but I’ll try to give you my impressions.
Secondly I haven’t jet tried all the features and programs that come with Symbian S60, because there’s a lot of content in the menus and also there is a variety of software available on the web. But without further ado, let’s get right into it.

First Impressions

Nokia E61i comes in a business looking package that contains the phone itself, charger, CD with software, hands-free and USB cable (for some reason my phone didn’t had the SD card in the box). The phone itself looks smaller in hand than on pictures, but it’s certainly not small or light compared to regular cellphone. Nokia E61i weights 150 g and dimensions are 117 x 70 x 13,9 (/11,5) mm. So at first it feels funny to hold the phone in hand, because it feels like regular scientific calculator that you’re holding next to your ear. But I’m sure I’ll get used to it as the time goes on. Also because it’s twice as heavy (and a lot wider) as my previous cellphone, it might be annoying at first when you hold the phone in you’re pocket. When it comes to accessories, the charger is quite small and very light, which is nice. It also has hands-free in the box, which is sort of old school, because it only has one mono speaker an the microphone (many newer “music” phones come with headphones for better experience). I’m not planning to listen to music a lot on the phone (maybe some podcasts), so that doesn’t bother me. USB cable has regular USB connector on one side and on the other side it has special Nokia connector, that goes into the phone. I didn’t try the software CD, because I downloaded software (Nokia PC Suite) from the Nokia site, but I’ll write about software later.

So overall first impressions were good. It’s a phone with a tweak, that needs some time to get used to.

Build and Features

The build quality of this phone is very good. It’s made of aluminum and plastic and keyboard buttons are made of rubber. It really feels solid in hand. Honestly, I don’t have anything negative to say about build quality and that just shows how good it is.

When it comes to design, there’s nothing interesting in it. It’s not a design miracle in any means. It just is a business looking phone in black and silver. But don’t get me wrong, it looks good, it just doesn’t have any identity or design appeal (like iPhone or Motorola RAZR).

Keyboard is full size QWERTY keyboard which is quite uncommon here in Estonia (like I have said before, BlackBerry’s and Palm’s are not common is Estonia), but that was one of the reasons I chose this phone. At first it feels weird to type on, because the buttons feel different from other phones, but after days of using, you’ll get used to it. The layout is somewhat different from regular QWERTY, for example Y is not next to T, instead it’s in the lower right corner. The keys itself are quite small, but it’s still reasonable to type on them. So for E-mail, SMS, notes and web surfing this keyboard is great.

Screen is 2.8″ QVGA with 16 million colors (320 x 240) and it’s of course it’s horizontal. The phone also has light sensor, that automatically sets the right brightness. The screen looks great and because of the layout, web surfing and watching videos is a pleasure.

E61i comes with 2.0 MP camera, which is located on the back. I have only made some test pictures and the quality is reasonable. It doesn’t come close to N95 or other good camera phones, but for business oriented phone it’s good enough. It has digital zoon and you can also film some videos, but I haven’t tried this feature jet (but I don’t except much from it).

Of course it comes with usual smartphone features like sound recording, music and video player, E-mail client, web browser and so on. If you have ever used Symbian OS, you know what I’m talking about. There’s nothing extraordinary in it. Music player plays MP3 and ACC formats, but I have a problem converting MP3-s with Nokia Music Management. It also plays video using RealPlayer, which is also reasonable. Unfortunately I haven’t got YouTube working with RealPlayer (when you choose a video, it opens it in RealPlayer, but doesen’t play it saying it cannot connect to server. So for multimedia, it does the job, but there’s nothing special in it.

It also has large variety of office tools like QuickOffice (for viewing documents, spreadsheets and presentations), PDF reader, archive tool and so on.

Default web browser that comes with the phone is actually quite good. It supports both mobile web pages and regular ones. Unfortunately flash doesn’t work in the browser (seprate flash player is under media section to play fash games or watch .flv movies). I also tried Opera Mini and Opera Mobile, but honestly I prefer Nokia’s browser. It just feels better and more integrated.

One thing that bothers me quite much, is some lag in the menus and operations. It might be the fault of Symbian or it’s due to the weak processor.

Conclusion

Overall, I’m very pleased with this phone. The keyboard is awesome (I even to some blogging and document editing on the phone), screen is great (only watching videos with realplayer could be better - full screen view doesn’t fill the screen and quality is somewhat medicore), sound quality is great and battery life is also reasonable for that kind of phone - I get about three days, but I also constantly do some web browsing, WIFI, multimedia and e-mailing. If I just used this phone for making calls, I’m quite sure it could last a week.

So the bottom line is: if you’re looking for a smartphone with full qwerty keyboard, WIFI and reasonable price, Nokia E61i is a good option.