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By Damian Koh
Jul 07, 2008

Rumors about the E71 have circulated on the Web long before the handset was officially announced. At the Nokia Connection event in June, the Finnish company finally came clean with the QWERTY smart phone to put all speculation to rest.

Design

There is only one thing we couldn't tell by looking at the pictures: The build quality. After spending some time with the E71, here's our verdict: Solid. And we mean it in the best and literal of ways. The metallic, duo-toned finish carried over from the E51 looks stylish and the construction of the smart phone is remarkable. You really have to pick it up to feel the solidness of the handset in the hands. On hindsight, the metallic chassis does attract a fair bit of fingerprint smudges.

Other than downsizing the screen from a generous 2.8 inches on the E61i to 2.36 inches on the E71, which frankly makes a difference only if you place the two phones side-by-side, the rest of the design aspects are improvements over the previous model. You still get the same QVGA resolution with support for up to 16 million colors. And at just 10mm thick and 57mm wide, the pocket-sized E71 puts a lot of other QWERTY phones to shame, including the earlier E61i.

Naturally, with a smaller footprint, something has to give. Initially our concern was with the E71's keyboard. It is noticeably smaller than the one on the E61i with the keys now placed right next to one another. But the now "tighter" keyboard cuts down the travel distance between letters Q and P, making it easier to type on the QWERTY with one hand.

After spending a few days with the phone, texting became second nature. The reduced spacing between the keys and the excellent tactility didn't make the experience any worse than some of the larger QWERTY keypads we have tested. There were times we made spelling mistakes and we reckon those with bigger digits may find it harder to get accustomed to the smaller keyboard, but that's where the auto-correction feature kicks in. It worked well in our trials, and for "standard" English words, we could get away with misspelling a few letters most of the time.

That said, the same feature could work against users who frequently use their own short forms or abbreviations as they would have to go through the suggested words and decide if they want to go with it, or stick to what they have originally typed. It's a little counter-intuitive at times, but we still gave it a thumbs-up for a decent implementation overall. It should be noted that the auto-correction feature can be turned off.

So with our concern over the keyboard thrown out the window, the next big question we asked was, did the real thing look as good or better than what's shown in the images? Again, for a QWERTY handset, the E71 looks gorgeous.

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