Back in the day, I didn't like smart-phones and all the bling-bling that came with it. That's the reason why I had a Nokia 3200. A simple mobile phone with a bad-quality camera but it was all fine for me. After a couple of years, the battery lost all of its quality and I had to charge it every couple of hours. I went to the shop to check out the price of a new battery. I discovered that original Nokia batteries are quite expensive. With that money, you can buy a new basic mobile phone.I had been saving some money and thought: "Why not try a smart-phone this time?" After all, I had this new job that requires me to use my car a lot. Since I am not good with maps, I sure was in need of a GPS system. I decided to buy a mobile phone combined with a GPS which comes in handy for my job so I went to the store. They recommended me a Nokia E71 smart-phone. That's when I bought mine! I bought it in March, 2009 so I can give a quite reliable review about it.
= First impression =
As far as I can remember, (after all, I already own a Nokia E71 for eight months) the Nokia E71 offered me three languages to choose from: Dutch, English and French. Since I'm Belgian, I picked Dutch as the interface language. The phone was getting ready for its first start and it took a couple of minutes.
After waiting for a moment, I was greeted by a very business-looking home screen. The phone also offered me a tutorial, but I like to experiment so I declined the offer. The first thing that caught my attention was the 'desktop', the home screen. It was filled with icons such as the calendar and other tools. There was an analog clock showing on the left side of the screen, and an indicator to show you whether there are wireless networks around you or not. I changed the analog clock to digital and tweaked the home screen a bit, and then started to experiment with the Nokia E71. Here is what I found.
= The home screen =
I already told you about the home screen. It looks like a computers desktop with icons on it that allow you to easily open and use your favorite programs. There's also a clock showing up on the left side of the screen, and there are indicators on the bottom of te screen showing you whatever it is you need to see. You can change the indicators to show how many calls you missed, how many unread messages you received, whether you received an e-mail message or not, whether there are wireless networks around you or not, and many more.
The icons can be adjusted. Let's say you use the
built-in web browser a lot. You can then place its icon on the desktop and access the browser in seconds. As you can see, everything is adjustable. There's another great feature (but I don't use it though, but some people might like it): the ability to create two home screens.
A business home screen with a calendar icon, an e-mail icon etc, and a home screen for when you're done working with icons to your favorite web browser, games, music etc. One moment your smart-phone can look really business-like, and the other moment it can look like a complete media-center for entertaining use on which you can listen to music, watch videos and play games. Amazing, really!
= Breathing light =
That's a quite new feature, I guess. Well, I must say that I have never seen it before. The D-pad button (the squared button in the middle which you use to press OK) is surrounded with light. If you are not using your mobile phone, the screen will go black after a couple of minutes to save battery power. To let you know that everything is fine and that your mobile phone is still turned on, the light which is surrounding the D-pad button will light up for a second, every eight seconds or so. That goes accompanied with a fading effect, which makes it seem that your phone is 'breathing', and it is therefore called the 'breathing light'.
So now we know the light is there to let you know that your phone is still activated when the screen went black because it's not in use, but the light also has other uses. When receiving an SMS-message or missing a call, the breathing light won't 'breath' anymore, but it will blink for half an hour (that's the standard configuration, you can adjust how long it blinks). Instead of looking at the screen to see if something happened, you can just check the breathing light. If it's blinking, your phone is asking for your attention. If it's breathing, there's nothing to worry about. This is too great!
= Quick touch buttons =
On the left side of the D-pad, there are two buttons, and the same goes for the right side of the D-pad. That makes four buttons. These buttons are called the quick touch buttons. The quick touch buttons can be used as a shortcut and will allow you to quickly fire up any of your favorite programs. You can adjust what will happen upon pressing them. You can assign two actions to each button: the first action can be triggered by just pressing the quick touch button, and the other action can be triggered by holding down the quick touch