Review/Video: Nokia's WiFi/UMTS capable, QWERTY equipped E61

Nokia E61

Nokia E61

Nokia E61

If 2005 was the year that music on handsets took center stage, then perhaps 2006 is the year of the QWERTY keyboard equipped messaging phone. Everybody has one these days, from the old hands at Palm and RIM through Motorola and even Samsung. The E61, the subject of this review, is Nokia's latest QWERTY equipped device and the first one to adopt, more or less, the "BlackBerry" form factor. As part of Nokia's Eseries of devices, targeted at business/enterprise users, the E61 also comes equipped with support for many different push email vendors as well as OMA remote management capabilities (such as remote wipe).

The E61 is a WiFi capable device that supports both GSM and UMTS 3G connections, but it does not support the UMTS frequency bands that are to be used in the United States. As such, Nokia is releasing a separate device, the E62, on Cingular in the US. While largely the same as the E61, the E62 lacks any UMTS support at all (even the US bands) and has had WiFi connectivity removed. It does retain EDGE data on each of its four GSM bands, though. Apart from those differences, the potential E62 owner can read this E61 review and know that it should ring true for their device as well.

For those of you with short attention spans, you can skip directly to our Nokia E61 video demo.

We'd like to thank Wireless Imports for providing our E61 review unit.

Physical Aspects

As previously mentioned, the E61 is Nokia's first mobile phone to adopt the "BlackBerry" form factor, that of the horizontally oriented display above a fully QWERTY keyboard in a thin, but wide, block form factor. With SIM and memory card, our E61 weighed in at 148g (5.2oz). Its 117mm x 70mm x 17mm (4.6" x 2.8" x .7") size makes it both wider and thicker than the recently released Motorola Q, and about the same size as a 8700 series RIM BlackBerry. The body of the E61 is clad in a combination of metal and plastic that give it a somewhat cool to the touch and solid feel. There is no scroll wheel or similar device on the sides of the E61, which is a bit of a shame. The volume keys can not be used for scrolling, and are located on the left hand edge of the device - adjacent to the dedicated voice memo recorder button (more on that later). The rear of the device is very simple, with a metal back battery cover and plastic top and bottom sections where the antennas are hidden. The bottom of the device is home to the pop port USB/headset connector, the infrared port, and the mini charger jack (the same used on the N90 and 770, among others).

The front of the E61 is dominated by the large display and the equally large QWERTY keyboard. The keyboard on the E61 is quite different from those found on competing devices. For one, the keys themselves are quite large, which I like. Odd, though, is the fact that they sit so loosely in their respective positions. I am reminded of the rubber keypad found on the old Nokia 3410, even though the E61's keys are indeed made of plastic. The plastic seems somehow softer than that used in the Motorola Q and Palm Treo designs, which I think is a good thing. Though it might take a short while to get used to, all of these changes seemed to add up to a good, solid keyboard design that I have grown to like very much. I still prefer the wider, more spacious keyboard found in the Sidekick 3, but I think the E61's keyboard bests those found in the Palm Treo and Motorola Q in terms of typing ease.

But there is more to a keyboard than the physical keys. The E61 has a number of special "shift" type keys that allow access to special characters and functions. Though the names and positions of these keys might differ from market to market, their usage should be pretty much the same. The blue function key in the bottom left hand corner of the keyboard is used to access the numeric keys and the other blue characters located on the rest of the keyboard. The function key can be held down while the second key is pressed, or simply pressed once before hitting the second key to obtain the same effect. I was happy to see that each side of the keyboard had its own shift key, both of which work similarly to the blue function in that they can be pressed or held. A lone control key can be used for accessing functions such as Copy and Paste, and a Car/Chr key can be used as a shift for foreign language letters. For example, holding down the key while pressing the O repeatedly will give you various non-English forms of the letter O.

The rest of the controls on the front of the E61 are also quite usable. Two wide softkeys sit atop an equally wide pair of call control keys. In the middle sit a dedicated menu key, the 5-way joystick controller, and the dedicated messaging application key. The joystick is one of the better ones that I have used recently, with enough of an edge to allow it to be gripped easily with a thumb, though it lacks any kind of real texture, which could be an issue for people that tend to have sweaty hands.

 

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