In an epic tale of heroism and 'making do', I lead you through a series of hopefully thought-provoking segments, showing that perhaps there's more to a smartphone than feeling compelled to buy the latest £400 hardware. In the process, I point out the potential benefits of one of Nokia's unsung heroes, the E61i, my main smartphone through the summer of 2007 and a device to which I was recently reintroduced. Reality bites home in the end, though, and I conclude that there's an equal acknowledgement to be made in terms of progress made by Nokia and Symbian over the last few years.
Read on in the full article.
It's interesting to contrast this with the recent C5 - a low-end but recent smartphone that could take the N95 8GB in a fight in spite of costing about a quarter of the price!
this phone is undeniably indispensible. loaded with smartmovie/divx player, my autistic son can do no worng with it! he pokes at the screen, drops it nth times and it still works wonders. he can't sleep without it watching barney videos. then my wife browse the net using skyfire. pages are viewed like on a desktop(slower loading of course), and typing with the qwerty key is a breeze. she cudnt ask for more...
The E90 is also from 2007. with that in mind I really don't think today's handsets are nowhere near as advanced as Nokia wants us to believe
please replace "don't" with "do" (obviously)
It always strikes me that what I was happily doing in 2006 on my e61 (podcasting, email and later push email, wi-fi browsing, instant messenging and voip, watching videos and listening to music comfortably) is touted years later as great breakthroughs brought by visionary companies .
You can change the quality of the youtube stream in coreplayers options. My n95 happily played medium quality FLV. Which looked FAR better than the official youtube player for s60 and played much smoother.
I have an original E61 on my desk (pre E61i). It was ground-breaking at the time. Big screen, WiFi, and integrated VOIP stack.
The main problem using it nowadays is the severe lack of RAM and that it doesn't like to work with WPA encryption on WiFi. E61i was much better in these respects, apparently.
On the back-to-the future theme, I was also thinking the N900 I have now is not a million miles from the HSPA HTC Vario II from a few years back. 'cept it is, of course.
Sockatume wrote:It's interesting to contrast this with the recent C5 - a low-end but recent smartphone that could take the N95 8GB in a fight in spite of costing about a quarter of the price!
This is the way things tend to go with technology ....
But on the flip side, I doubt the C5 could take the N95 8gb in a comparison. Camera isn't as good, hardware won't handle screen refreshes anywhere near as well as the N95. Even the N85 that was a "replacement" for the N95 wasn't as good on a hardware level. It was only point improvements in firmware that made the N85 a slightly nicer device to use.
I bought my e61i on ebay and fell in love with it. The screen size was fantastic. Even though my brother referred to it as a "calculator" because of its size, it was still very pocketable because it was pretty flat. I never had a case for it and dropped it several times with minimal damage. Unfortunately, I loaned it to my brother who has since destroyed it (the charge port fell out and is lost). I have used Nokia phones since the 5120 (I think) and now have the e71. The e61i is my favorite so far.
i'm also using the e61 and besides the hefty size (even larger than e61i!), was quite satisfied. i did not encounter the startup problems u stated about the skyfire browser, besides the slow processing of media intensive sites. but when accessing the ovi store (using native s60 browser), many newer applications and games do not show up, compared to the wider variety u can enjoy on the newer devices like the E71/72. this is inevitable as of the older OS version and processor, but to me, a real bummer.
A few weeks ago, when my lovely E72 spent a week and a half in repair shop, I also dug out my old E61i and used it as a backup device.
Well... the screen IS a blast, I agree. But the general slowness of the system is too much for me to handle. I was rather annoyed by that already at 2008. And someow I do find the keys very, very uncomfortable compared to the latest versions. E71 and E72 keys are much more usable, despite of smaller size. Not to mention the number key labels, what are way more recognizable at my E72, no matter that the numbers are not marked by color and are the same black-and-white (which I absolutely love) as the rest of the keys.
I do disagree about the Ovi Maps though - I remember installing the Maps 1.0 and it did work with bluetooth GPS module, however I never did purchase a navigating licence. I just observed myself on the map. And it did give me driving instructions, I just had to have somebody looking at the screen while driving.
I'd say - the upgrade to more modern E device is worth every penny and at the same time I agree -You CAN have your way around with E61i, but with some serious compromizes.
J.
I've owned 2 e61i's over the last 2 years. Even though I love the screen size and keyboard, I do not share your enthusiasm over the build quality. Both of my devices have a loose plastic part, the one over the battery cover. Both devices have a defective earpiece. I can barely hear people who call me. The microphone seems iffy as well. I had the speakers replaced twice and that solves the problem for a while and then it reoccurs. Maybe I got units from a defective batch. I still come back to it despite its flaws.
Another thing people forget is that, in many respects, the e61i could do 80% of what the e90 could do, but for half the price, and less bulk.
you forgot to mention web browsing. Obviously, the built in browser is not that great, but opera mini can help to fix that a lot.
One thing which should be addressed would be the frequency of updates. I had the e61 (no fancy camera like the e61i!) , which was marketed as a business phone; it came not with quickoffice but some other office editor, which regularly mangled files and corrupted them to the point where it was unusable - I ended up buying quickoffice. The reason I bought quickoffice was that the updates (which could have sorted out these problems) dried up very soon after the phone was released.
I was incredibly disappointed with Nokia's response at the time (non-existent on forums etc) - if they are marketing business phones, these should have a guaranteed 2/3-year support cycle to ensure software stability, and security of email, browsers etc.
On the E61i MfE works great for syncing with google sever.
(And I think SyncML also is supported.)
Still using an E61i as my one and only smart phone. Agree as to its indestructability. Been down the toilet twice (don't ask). Dries out, almost like new. When a car drove over it, I had to get a replacement as it would only receive calls and no longer made them (screen looked quite odd). Have not been through your article in detail but I have not felt the need to add very much to modernise mine. I use a bluetooth GPS (cheap one, not the Nokia unit and a bit variable on reliability) and various third party mapping apps (small plug for Mobile Trail Explorer if you have any interest in Open Street Mapping etc). Otherwise great. Might upgrade to E72 soon but only if network operator offers it to me for free.
Hi Steve,
Great Article! I actually did the same thing a few months ago. Found a beat up old e61i online, bought it and spent a worried fifteen minutes wondering what had happened to it. I went online for some direction on how to disassemble it and spent a good hour cleaning it up and putting it back together. Quite amazing, the amount of dust (amongst other things) a mobile phone can "collect". There were actually two reasons for getting an e61i. I wanted to fool around with symbian a bit and see what the OS is all about. As a partner in an on-line services company working with Zimbra, we want to try out as many devices as possible. In fact, in my experience online synchronisation with our servers worked out of the box. We use the mail-for-exchange utility. Unfortunately my experience (or patience) is rather limited, whenever I send an e-mail the sender is "mail for exchange". O well, it's just for testing purposes.
Another reason for me, and I would appreciate getting your opinion on this, is: current screens on candybar/monoblock devices are just too small for my eyes. I have yet to reach 40, but I've spent so much time staring at mobile and laptop screens that my eyes get tired of looking at a 2.2 inch screen. Never mind the size of the device, as long as I don't need to be "leaning into my device" in order to operate it. I understand there are plenty of full touch and slide out qwerty devices out there. But please: can someone make a decent, durable, big screen monoblock device. (No blackberries please, the service is too expensive and I prefer metal!)
Keep up the great work. I wish I had as many devices to play with as you do.
Regards,
Ben
Are there any wizzards in the world that could replace the E61i internals with the faster, better internals from a E72 (or other device)? So I could keep the screen and the keyboard �nd have a faster device!
Regards,
Ben
Hi Steve
I'm switching backwards and forwards between my nokia 5800 and more recently purchased e61. You can get Mail for Exchange and that opens up the ability to sync with Google for calendar and contacts (which is what I have been doing) and probably any other over the air sync-ing which is available. Thanks to you, I also installed TehkBlack Ovi theme, which I think makes this 'old' phone look bang up to date. A propos of your latest Phones Show Audio Chat, one of the main reasons I bought this phone was so that I could read things with my increasingly kn*ckered eyes and the e61 still beats the 5800 hands down for this! The keyboard is fantastic - I wouldn't be able to use the e63/e71/e72 keyboard because my thumbs are too big for those tiny buttons, but I can fly when typing on the e61's keyboard. If only it could take an 8gb microSDHC card, it would be perfect!
E 61i is simply ao addictive phone. I sold one a few years back , and brought a new one again recently (they had old stock). I would say it is an iconic phone. It feels different to the feel than any other I have held. I wonder why nokia did not think of puttig the internals of the e 71 into this. It would have become the harley-davidson of phones.
Thank you for the great post. I literally was looking on the Internet for just this kind of post. I too have an E61i which I abandoned for a MyTouch 3G (Android Phone).
I set the E61i phone on my night stand. After a few months I could not stand it that I had a great phone sitting on my stand doing nothing. So I picked it up and upgraded all the existing apps that I could. I wanted to then bring (pimp) it up to current standards and that's how I ended up here.
It's too bad Nokia abandoned this phone. This phone was made to last but yet Nokia stopped making updates for it. Yet you think they would continue the legacy, no...they came up with the E71. They could have continued with the E61i format and upgraded the screen resolution. These ignorant moves from Nokia made me abandon the brand all together. None the less I will still keep using my E61i until it dies out.
Is there a plug-in where i can type the name of the contact and the contact appears?
I can do this on the newer E series, but I want to be able to do this with the E61i