Nokia E71: Evolution of a QWERTY Keypad

Having used an E71 on loan from Nokia’s WOM World for about a week now, I can say without reservation that it’s got the best QWERTY keypad yet in this particular variant of Eseries handsets. But why just tell you when I can show you as well?

Note that I’m using my dummy white E71 as a model here, not the actual black unit that Nokia sent me, only because it photographed better on this rainy fall day…

You may remember that Nokia’s first BlackBerry killer, the E61, won my inaugural QWERTY Smartphone Smackdown last year, narrowly edging out the Danger hiptop/Sidekick because it could be used with one hand.

As you can see the keys were nice and big, but compared with what was to come were a little too squishy in practice — that is, they had lots of travel without much tactile feedback.

The E61i addressed this with stiffer keys that gave a satisfying click when pressed. Squaring them off and separating them a bit also helped, as did adding more application shortcuts around the D-pad (and putting the D-pad on there in first place) but I actually found typing on my E61i a bit tiring after thumbing out a long document or email — especially in comparison to the much bigger E90 and even Nokia’s N95 8GB.

The diminutive E71 looked like it was set for disaster, with impossibly small keys jammed up right next to each other. But I’m happy to report that this just isn’t the case. With both longer travel and tactile feedback — that’s “squishy and clickety” in English — this is definitely the best keypad of the bunch. And despite being so close together the keys are curved vertically so accuracy is barely an issue. I’ve hit ‘w’ instead of ‘e’ a couple of times but I can be a pretty sloppy typist when I get excited. And given that you can hold and use an E71 in one hand much more easily than its forebears I don’t think anyone will mind the smaller keys.

The E71 has reminded me how much I depend on text entry, and I honestly don’t I could go back to a T9 device. Or in other words, I’m buying one.

Nokia’s E90: Versus My E61i

S60 Cannibalism

Short answer: My E61i has about 75% of the E90’s features for about 50% of the price, and thus for me is a better fit.

What, you want more? Ok, fine…

Long answer: The E90 is absolutely for you if you’re a comedy mogul and/or in need of an uncompromising business device. It’s not quite a laptop replacement but the vastly-wide screen allows for some serious work on spreadsheets, email and the like.

That said, it’s not without its flaws — namely:

The QWERTY Keypad

The keys themselves are nice and big, and have a nice “click” to them. The dedicated number row also comes in extremely handy. And the dedicated row of shortcuts above that? Well now you’re just spoiling me!

So what’s to complain about? Well, in my opinion the keypad is just too wide to use comfortably — and I’ve done a fair amount of research into QWERTY usability.

For the record I also tried the keypad with the E90 on a table, like a laptop. This didn’t work for me either — the keys are too small to touch-type with, which doesn’t matter anyway because whichever digits you use to input data will end up blocking the screen from view, as it’s very wide but not tall.

Oh, and the backlight is far too weak, and there doesn’t seem to be any settings to adjust it.

Open Wide

The Heft

The E90 is entirely usable if you’re in a boardroom meeting or the executive lounge of an international airport, but on the move the horizontal clamshell becomes a bit too unwieldy for my tastes.

When closed it’s great to take calls on and honestly doesn’t even seem that big. But like my old hiptop, when opened up this monster makes for quite a challenge to hammer out a text with one hand — especially with the soft menu buttons positioned up on the screen portion of the device.

And there’s also the matter of that horrible camera button I previously wrote about…

Interior Screen

If you can live with these shortcomings you’ll be rewarded with a serious productivity tool, one with a proud lineage and a notable community of users including Agents Mulder & Sculley and The Saint.

You’ll also be treated to the best mobile operating system on the planet, but I’m biased that way…

Nokia N95 Trial: Against My E61i

WTF indeed; permit me to explain…

So I’ve had a Nokia N95 8GB in my possession for a week now, and I think I know it well enough to deliver a final verdict, at least in relation to my current Nokia handset, the comparatively stuffy E61i.

I should state up front that both of these devices make for an excellent smartphone experience, and S60 itself ranks up there with my favourite mobile platforms of all time, right alongside the groundbreaking first-generation Treo and the unlimited data-driven Fido hiptop. And I’m not just pandering to WOM World here; I’ve had my E61i for a year this month and the fact that this die-hard Mac user hasn’t yet been swayed by the iPhone must count for something!

I should also point out that as a Canadian, the latest super-fast 3G data network is all but useless to me, because mobile data in this country is so expensive to begin with. I have to pare down web pages with Opera Mini anyway, and since there isn’t any visible speed difference between EDGE and WiFi I suspect there wouldn’t be any noticeable gain with HSDPA either.

That puts the N95 at a bit of a disadvantage out of the starting gate — at least the North American variant targeted at me. And even though its seemingly endless list of features leaves my lowly E61i in the dust, I ultimately don’t think it’s for me.

Why?

The answer becomes clear only when I break down exactly what I use my smartphone for. In terms of percentages it plays out like this:

Photo & Video Capture

Right off the bat you can see that taking photos and videos isn’t so much a priority for me, despite being a graduate of film school and a neophyte citizen journalist. There’s no denying the superiority of the N95’s autofocus 5 megapixel stills and DVD-quality videos, but my E61i’s 2 megapixel imager and 352×288 pixels video capability is good enough considering that I hate flash photography in general and must wait until I get home to upload large media files to the web via WiFi.

Document Editing

Despite its low ranking this is a fairly crucial smartphone feature for me. Here, the E61i trumps the N95 with a full version of Quickoffice preloaded onto the device. If I had to pay for an office suite on the N95 I’d probably go with — go figure — OfficeSuite, if only for its support of OpenOffice formats.

Gaming

The N95 obviously gets the nod here for its N-Gage support, even though there aren’t yet that many games available for download. But if you’re a fan of console ROMs you’ll actually find the E61i a perfectly good gaming device, mostly because of its landscape-oriented screen.

Web Browsing

That landscape screen is also the deciding factor here — the N95 loses out only because I can’t use the #2 and #8 keys to page up and down when the slider is flipped to the landscape position. I’ve also noticed that my favourite mobile browser actually seems slower on the N95 than my E61i, which doesn’t make any sense to me, yet persists after a reinstall of the app.

Texting

As you’d expect its QWERTY keypad makes the E61i the uncontested SMS champ. But it’s not so much of a rout as you’d think; I’ve been pleasantly surprised by Nokia’s implementation of T9 and would go so far to say that’s it’s likely even more accurate than my own unpredictive QWERTY thumbing. Its shortcomings become apparent only when you want to enter “challenging” text — symbols, all caps, web URLs, that sort of thing. Switching between different modes of text entry is probably as easy as it can be, but it’s still extremely tedious.

An unexpected surprise was the N95’s keypad, damn near perfect in terms of key size and tactility. It makes my E61i seem absolutely stiff by comparison. Still, you can’t really argue with the simple fact that 39 keys beats 12 any day of the week.

I should probably point out a possible issue in terms of build quality. This N95 I’ve been using has clearly seen a lot of action and as a result is pretty creaky, with lots of give in the chassis even when closed. My E61i, on the other hand, is as rock solid as it was out of the box almost a year ago — and it’s travelled with me to Bermuda, New Zealand and Egypt, along with an unscheduled trip or two to the pavement from about waist-high.

But build quality aside, the N95 is an absolutely killer handset and feature for feature is the most advanced smartphone that money can buy — at least until the second coming of the JeebusPhone next week…