Phone rating: 
In a nutshell: The Nokia E71 is Nokia's greatest challenge to BlackBerry yet. With full support for push email, attachment editing and web browsing, Nokia have definitely parked their tanks on the BlackBerry lawn. The E71 also features full multimedia capabilities, including a 3.2 megapixel camera, video calling, and a media player. HSDPA, WLAN, GPS and big battery power complete the package. It's available in a choice of Grey Steel or White Steel.
Best buy: *Free* from Dialaphone or Vodafone Business Shop.
It's the Nokia E71 vs the BlackBerry Bold for the title of best business phone of 2008! For the past couple of years, BlackBerry have been carving out a niche as the brand of choice for corporate users, with their winning combination of full or near-full QWERTY keypads and push email systems. Nokia have been steadily improving the user-friendliness and power of their E series phones too, and now it seems that both BlackBerry and Nokia have made a further leap forward and both landed up with highly polished mobile communications devices. Whether you choose the BlackBerry or the Nokia, you shouldn't go far wrong when it comes to communicating on the move.
Both the E71 and the Bold offer a full QWERTY keypad, with numeric keys situated in the centre. The Bold has a more refined styling, whilst the E71 has more buttons to push and a more techy look and feel. The E71's extra buttons are dedicated one-touch keys for Home, calendar, contacts, and email. The E71 uses a Navi™Key that works rather like the mouse pad on a a laptop and provides accelerated scrolling for moving about the screen. This is arguably a better input method than the BlackBerry trackball. The Nokia also has software aids to text input, including automatic spelling correction, auto-completion, and word candidate lists. The E71 is quite a bit narrower than the Bold, making the keys slightly smaller, but has the advantage of being much thinner. In fact, at just 10mm thickness it feels almost flat, and makes the Bold (measuring 15mm) look huge by comparison. Either way, both devices provide excellent support for text input.
Nokia have equipped the E71 with one of their best screens. Measuring 2.36 inches across, with a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels, this gives a good space for working on emails and documents, or viewing web pages, but it doesn't have as high a resolution as the Bold's screen. Nevertheless it's an excellent display, capable of displaying 16 million colours and using an active matrix LCD for good visibility and clarity, even in moderate sunlight.
The E71 can be used handsfree, with either a handsfree speaker or a Bluetooth wireless headset, combined with both speaker-dependent and speaker-independent voice dialling. You can set the phone to answer automatically when using a headset or a car kit.
Messaging is what the E71 is all about, of course, and it is well equipped for both push email and text messaging. The device supports IMAP, POP and SMTP email protocols, as well as Nokia Intellisync Wireless Email. Attachments are supported, and the Quickoffice application lets you view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. We don't think that Nokia have caught up with BlackBerry yet, but the email system is certainly usable. The E71 is fully equipped for security, with a keypad lock, remote lock and even encryption for data stored in memory or on the memory card. Full support for Virtual Private Networks is provided.
The phone is also strong on multimedia. A 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus and flash is included, and you can record video in MPEG4 or 3GP formats at a resolution of 640 x 480 at 22 fps or 320 x 240 (QVGA) at 30 fps. A secondary front-facing camera is used for video calling. The camera certainly beats the Bold's camera without a doubt, although you might argue that for a phone of this type, the camera is rather over-specified. The music player can handle all common formats, and there's also an FM radio with Visual Radio support. RealPlayer is used to playback video.
Like many smartphones, the Nokia includes integrated A-GPS satellite navigation, with the Nokia Maps application pre-installed.
You can also use the phone for web browsing. The built-in browser can handle XHTML, Javascript, stylesheets and Flash, so is able to display most websites correctly. You can use the Navi™Key very effectively to zoom in on web pages, a bit like the iPhone.
The E71 has excellent connectivity with support for Bluetooth 2.0 (with Enhanced Data Rate), micro USB, WLAN and even Infrared. The WLAN connection can be used to make VoIP calls. A 2.5mm Nokia headphone socket is provided, so you can plug in a compatible headset, but it would have been nice to have a universal 3.5mm jack, like the BlackBerry Bold has. The phone also features FOTA (firmware updatable over the air.) A comprehensive suite of personal organiser functions is included.
Battery life is very good, but the WLAN eats battery power quite quickly, so you won't want to go without a charger for too long if you're planning to make much use of this feature. Remember to turn off WLAN when not in use! And the GPS too! The internal memory of the phone is 110 Mbytes, plus the option to add up to 8 Gbytes of microSD card memory. Whilst many users may find this to be sufficient, we'd have preferred to see a lot more internal memory. The BlackBerry Bold comes with a 1GB or internal memory, and we feel that the Nokia is under-specified in this department.
So, which to choose: the Nokia E71 or the BlackBerry Bold? As usual, it's horses for courses. The E71 is significantly more compact than the BlackBerry, is probably better built, and has a much better camera. It holds its own when it comes to applications, connectivity and battery life. But the BlackBerry beats the Nokia when you consider the size of the display, its vastly superior memory, its ease-of-use and power when it comes to configuring email, and probably the keypad too. Don't get us wrong, the E71 is a great device, and probably Nokia's best mobile office so far, but BlackBerry still rules in the kingdom of mobile email.
