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.

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…

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…

In preparation for my annual trip to Bermuda and its Film Festival I thought I’d go paperless with Air Canada’s new Mobile Check-in service. And predictably, instead of ending up with a 2D barcode I got the message seen in the screen grab above.

Just so I’m clear on this… I have a phone running the number one smartphone OS in the world, made by the world’s number one handset manufacturer, and yet it’s not recognized by Air Canada.

My bad, clearly…

If you haven’t yet heard, Fido has now joined Bell Canada and Telus Mobility in offering cheap, unlimited data — with a catch: $7/month will get you unlimited web surfing, but only through their crap-tastic WAP portal on a Fido-branded handset.

And just how bad is their WAP portal? For this test I attempted to retrieve movie listings for a popular cinema here in Toronto, the ScotiaBank Theatre. I compared Fido’s mobile portal (wap.fido.ca) with AvantGo and the recently-reviewed Opera Mini. I’ll let this series of screen grabs tell the tale…

wap.fido.ca via Nokia S60 WAP Browser:

Here’s a thoughtful touch: An option to sign up for unlimited browsing right from Fido’s disclaimer page…

Hang on, unlimited web surfing and all I get is this?

I would have put movie listings on the main page, but whatevs…

Ah, Cinema Clock… A trusted source for Canadian movie listings on the full-sized internet, and a good choice for this test — they’ve passed on a publicly-available mobile site and have chosen instead to deal directly with (and exclusively through) the carriers.

Okay, fair enough… Fido is after all a national carrier. Sure has been a lot of clicks, though…

Almost there…

My thumb is starting to cramp up now…

Excuse me, but aren’t there more than two movie theatres in downtown Toronto?!

Number of screens to destination: 8
Total data used: 27 kB
Goal achieved? Hells no!

AvantGo via Opera Mini:

Damn, wish there was some way to turn off this S60 permissions nag. I’ll have to count this as two screens.

Yup, AvantGo is still alive and kicking!

You can only get mobile access to FilmCan through an AvantGo account — seems silly but it’s about to pay off…

Through your desktop browser you can pre-load your favourite cinemas into your FilmCan listings — an extra step I suppose, but you only have to do it once!

Et voilà! Sadly, I missed the 9:50pm screening of 27 Dresses… Dang!

Number of screens to destination: 6
Total data used: 35 kB
Goal achieved? Hells yeah!

1. Carrier portals suck.
2. Companies that have a mobile online presence exclusively through carriers also suck.
3. AvantGo still has a place in the 21st century — who knew?!

The lowly Java app is the bane of the S60 user’s existence — I mean, what’s the point of having a modern, multitasking mobile operating system if some dinky little program is going to ignore your UI and suck up all your available memory while it runs?

Well, in the case of Opera Mini the hassle is entirely worth it.

I’ve been hearing about Opera Mini since my days with the CrackBerry — folks over at the HowardForums had recommended it as the web counterpart to RIM’s mobile-optimized email, offering up the ability to surf full-sized websites while saving precious kilobytes on Fido’s less-than-generous BlackBerry Connect plans. This same technology is also available for followers of the WinMo, Treo and just about any other mobile handset on the market — except the iPhone, that is… Haw-haw!

What makes this Opera sing (sorry) is the heavy-lifting going on backstage, otherwise known as server-side optimization. It goes something like this:

1. You fire up Opera Mini on your mobile and send out a request for a web page.
2. The page goes through Opera’s servers; on the way back to you the graphics get compressed (based on your own settings) and the stuff your mobile can’t read gets stripped out.
3. You see a thumbnail of the original page and a cursor to zoom in on various parts of the page. It won’t impress your friends quite like pinching and spreading your fingers on an iPhone or iPod touch, but it works just the same if not better.

This is all fine and well, but what sold yours truly on Opera Mini was a demo I saw this past week on BBC World’s Click!, wherein the synchronizing of mobile bookmarks was accomplished by dragging an dropping tabs from an Opera desktop browser — on a Mac, no less!

The interface is called “Speed Dial”. You can see for yourself what it looks like on a full-sized computer by clicking on the thumbnail to the right, and/or have a look at Opera’s own Flash demo.

The other half of the equation is Opera Link. Note that to get this all working you need beta 9.5 of the desktop browser, Opera Mini 4 and an Opera Link account, all of which are 100% free.

So here’s what Speed Dial looks like on my E61i:

The “Bookmarks” link leads to my vast directory of mobile portals and whatnot that I’ve been collecting since my first smartphone. These nine shortcuts are more easily accessed via the pop-up menu seen below:

You may notice that my Speed Dial links are all mobile-friendly web pages to begin with. Let’s just say I’m really stingy with data.

It took me an evening and the following morning to get everything up and running, and I’ve yet to try out the software on other platforms, but so far Opera Mini has proven itself worthy of a coveted spot on my Nokia’s standby screen:

You’ll notice that Nokia’s own web and WAP browsers are nowhere in sight! Kudos to you Opera Mini, for making the Wee World Web a better place…

I may have given up on Podcasting myself, but that doesn’t mean I can contribute to the Podcasts I listen to, right?

The kind folks at All About Symbian have featured an audio comment I submitted to them in their latest AAS Insight — if you absolutely need to skip ahead to my part you can scrub through the embedded audio on the page to about the 18:20 mark.

I myself just heard it this very morning in the gym, and especially enjoyed making Steve Litchfield squirm in defence of his Smartphones Show not playing natively on my E61i. Not to worry Steve — from now on I’ll catch the YouTube version with the free S60 player you talked about earlier in the Insight…

Last summer when I bought my E61i I knew it would need protection against the rigors of everyday use. So I spared no expense and ordered a custom-made handcrafted leather case from Vaja, based on the company’s excellent reputation and some pretty alluring photos. It’s a shame I didn’t read this first.

As this first photo (kind of) shows, the Vaja’s hard, plastic screen protector has gotten so scratched up after only a few months use that it’s interfering with the readability of my Nokia’s screen. This, combined with the growing realization that one’s mobile should best be hidden from view (instead of gaudily hanging from one’s belt or messenger bag for all to see) got me thinking about something better.

As I live only a few short blocks away from Toronto’s Chinatown I often seen these cheap, “crystal” hard plastic cases for phones — nobody in town seems to stock them for the E61i, but I found a dealer on eBay who offers them so cheap that I ordered two. And as you can see here, they look awesome!

I realize that I’m contributing to global warming by supporting non-recyclable plastic made in some third-world sweatshop, but at least I didn’t kill a cow! The hard plastic is not only more durable than the Vaja screen protector, but I swear there’s some kind of ultra-violet coating on it — my screen has never seemed so vibrant and sharp!

Another benefit is that all four corners of my Nokia are protected in case of a fall, though I’ve heard from other crystal case users that the two halves of the case usually shatter apart upon impact, so you’ll want to make sure you catch your phone on the first bounce!

All in all, for $2 CAD plus shipping you can’t really go wrong with one of these babies, unless your mobile has moving parts (i.e. it’s a clamshell or slider), though apparently you can buy crystal cases for those too…

You’re looking at Sadat Subway station, the major landmark closest to the hotel where I stayed in Cairo. It’s a screen grab courtesy of Nokia Maps and my Bluetooth GPS unit, which I did indeed use to navigate my way through Egypt, despite the fact that the there’s no visible GPS signal showing in the bottom right corner of the screen — ahem…

It was the first time I’ve ever used GPS in my travels, and I have to admit that the jury is out as to whether I really needed it or not.

Here’s what Nokia makes of Luxor — note that Crocodile Island is a landmark I added myself (it’s where our hotel there was). As you can see, there’s not too much in the way of detail. I kept my GPS unit running on the overnight train all the way back to Cairo, and the maps from my E61i’s built-in database were similarly sparse right up until we got back into the city proper.

Part of the blame should be pointed at whomever collates the maps for Nokia. Here’s my hotel in Giza, and the Great Pyramids — probably occupying that empty space to the left — are nowhere to be found!

But perhaps I had unrealistic expectations for GPS. It’s certainly comforting to have a general sense of where you’re at, but I maintain that the best way to get acclimatized to foreign surroundings is to walk in progressively larger concentric circles around your hotel. It’s worked for me everywhere I’ve visited with the possible exception of Lima, Peru.

I know what you’re thinking: “Come on, Currie… Another video from Egypt?!”

This one is actually a good lead-in for my next post… It was captured in Cairo’s famous mobile phone Souk — I was hipped to it by our tour guide in Luxor.

Note that like your typical stupid tourist I completely butchered the name of the store mentioned in the video, despite roaming on their very network with my Nokia. It is not “Eltistadt” or whatever the hell I said, but in fact Etisalat… My bad.

BTW, despite their claims of having the only 3.75G network in Egypt, I could only get 3G on my E61i.