Surprisingly, despite Nokia’s dominance, I have never used a Nokia phone before, the last 3 phones I owned were either Sony Ericsson or Samsung, and well, this makes for a nice change. I have been considering to get this phone for quite awhile, the wait was extended also no thanks to Singtel and the Red Wheels promotion, which gave me a $100 dollars voucher but required a student plan, hmm, the corporate plan under Mindef was still a better deal. I ended up not using the voucher and could have just gotten the phone a couple of months ago. Well, better late than never!
What can I say, first impression of this phone is that it is wide and kinda bulky, but it makes up for it by being both slim and quite light actually, so it does fit nicely into the pocket. I haven’t gotten used to one hand operation, and it might be abit unwieldy at times but it should be a matter of adjustment.
As for the phone itself, features wise, it is amazing. It lacks a camera, which is a great thing for me, the main reason why I considered this phone over the E65 other than the larger screen. It HAS a great screen, I reckon it is as large as the Ipod Video, around 3”, I’ve tried watching anime and trailers on it, quality’s decent and definitely watchable, even with the subtitles. One negative point, there’s no headset jack, unless you use the mono earpiece. It doesn’t come with any easy way of getting audio out to a decent headphones, might need to invest in an connector, which adds more bulk, so that’s a big disadvantage to me.
Wifi! Phones are getting impressive. With WiFi, sky’s the limit! So many possible benefits here, browsing on the go, VOIP, synchronising contacts, messages, emails. Especially with Wireless@SG set to become more popular, this is a great feature. All around campus WiFi means I’m now always connected in school. It’s a 3G phone which can be rather expensive if you don’t have a data plan (I don’t). The battery life is quite decent too, its been 2 days, and after some surfing here and there, a few phone calls, usual sms-es and the battery is still around 70-80%, will see how long it can last.
VOIP is pretty nice technology. Starhub and Pfingo offers you a VOIP number for free currently, and you can pretty much receive calls anywhere on your Pfingo number as long as you are connected.
The E61 is really a geek toy, how many people would want a full keyboard for a mobile phone? The E61 also runs on Symbian OS, which allows for use of various software, although probably not as extensible as say windows mobile, but it has a decent community still, and more and more programs should be coming with a larger user base.
One of the cool software available on the current Nokia series platform would be Smart2Go, a mapping software released by Nokia. It has maps of many countries in the world, including Singapore. Alright, from what I see so far, the navigation is easily done by search and it works well and fast, since the maps are stored on the memory card. It works pretty fast offline.
The software has a very Google-Earth styling, where it will fly around the globe before zooming down to your location, looks nice, however functionally might be a bit slow though. Well, after searching for the place, it then brings you to the onscreen map display. Zoom and scroll options are still available. I guess the map might be a bit small but well, it shows me how I can get to the place I want!
There’s also an included Route Planner where it does a turn by turn navigation coupled with voice if you have a GPS attached. There’s a simulation of that by setting a default speed for the car but I guess that’s not too useful. Well, the instructions ain’t bad and could be useful when I’m out and could be useful in determining how to get to a place I suppose. For now though, a bus guide might be more useful since I don’t drive all that often. :)
Well, erm, my take on it all? Navigation systems are getting quite plentiful, but this is firstly free and quite user friendly and the maps are definitely functional which is all good. It’s definitely one of the great software on the phone and well, ya, Singapore is pretty much easy to move around but a little backup isn’t a bad thing. Sucks that you need a separate bluetooth GPS unit though.
Verdict
Absolutely no regrets on getting my first ever smart phone, the Nokia E61!