Nokia E61i Review - Features

Features

 

Editor Rating: 4.5

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Styling:  4 

Ease of Use:  5 

Display:  4 

Voice Quality:  5 

Battery Life:  4 

Quality/Durability:  5 

While it’s a business phone through and through, the E61i’s Symbian Series 60 roots add plenty of entertainment options to the mix for those who want a little fun to offset all of that work.  A pre-installed media player handles a variety of audio and video files, and the image gallery lets you browse and view images snapped with the handset’s camera or loaded via Bluetooth, memory card, or Web download.

PIM functionality is good, and business users will appreciate the Nokia Team Suite, which adds support for organizing information around “teams.”  You can gather your team members, conference call info and documents together in one place for easy access when you need to communicate with the rest of your team. 

Series 60 users already know there's a ton of add-on software available out there to extend their smartphone's functionality.  The OS is also more than capable for multitasking and doing all of the other things power users are used to.  And while S60 devices aren’t generally the fastest smartphones around, I found the E61i’s performance to be sufficiently speedy.

Nokia’s implementation of cameras across their high-end handsets continues to frustrate me.  Though I understand the marketing thought behind differentiating feature sets in order to push consumers to spend more money, I swear Nokia offers several dozen variations of “two megapixel cameras” on their mobile phones - some have auto focus, some have a flash assist light, some have both, and some have neither.

The two megapixel shooter found on the E61i is of the bare bones variety.  There’s no flash assist light, no self-portrait mirror, and the quality is below average for a 2MP sensor.  Photos taken with the handset tended towards blurry, with somewhat muted colors.  Given that the E62 doesn’t have a camera at all (many business users prefer camera-less phones, for corporate security reasons), I suppose any camera on the E61i is an upgrade, but still ... Nokia put killer cameras in the N95/93/73 handsets, so clearly they know how to do it.  Why bother fitting your high-end handsets with mediocre cameras, Nokia?

The E61i’s camera does feature a handful of quality and resolution settings, a night mode, and 4x digital zoom.  Video capture is also supported at CIF resolution @ 15 frames per second, though the quality of video clips wasn’t much better than that of stills.  Videos also were rather pixelated upon playback.