Nokia N71 (2)

Nokia N71 review: A matter of taste

Nokia N71 is another Symbian 9.1 smartphone in the collection of Nokia. The new clamshell is well equipped and is aimed in the mid-range of customers. It is based on the S60 3rd edition user interface. N71 has 3G UMTS support and can offer fast data transfer via GPRS and EDGE. Besides the 2 megapixel camera there is also a VGA one for video calls. The construction and design of the phone are quite controversial as it is bulky and somewhat unstable in hand, but this, of course, is a matter of personal taste.

Nokia N71

Key features:

• Nice display
• High-quality 2 megapixel camera with LED flash
• VGA video calls camera
• 3G UMTS
• 128 MB miniSD card included
• GPRS and EDGE fast data transfer support
• Bluetooth, Infrared and USB (Pop-Port)
• Very fast user interface response
• FM radio

Main disadvantages:

• Bulky size
• Unstable construction (this issue may occur only in our test sample)
• Slightly unhandy top part of the keypad
• Very small On/Off/Profiles button
• No compatibility between older Symbian applications and Symbian 9.1

Nokia N71 is based on the 3rd edition Series 60 Nokia user interface and thus is very much alike Nokia N80, E60 and N91. All four phones have huge possibilities but lack software as the S60 UI is brand new and the developers have not yet produced applications for it.

Grey and silver

Nokia N71 looks and feels very big for a clamshell. The phone is rather thick and wide. The design is well balanced in the two-color scheme of gray and silver outlining. Its dimensions are 98.6 x 51.2 x 25.8 mm and when you hold it in your hand you will feel frustrated with the sheer volume of this piece. It is heavy too, 139 g.

Nokia N71 held in hand

Of course, there are people who like solid, massive phones and they will most definitely enjoy Nokia N71 but it is much too big for our taste – especially when it comes to clamshells.

Massive but not solid

A big surprise in N71 is that although it is a big phone and is supposed to be very stable, there are some construction mishaps in it. The most major one is the top part of the clamshell. When it is closed, it plays a bit to the both sides. Probably that comes from the poor hinging of the two parts.

The opening and closing mechanism, however, works perfectly. It produces a click sound so you would know when you have reached the desired position. Nokia N71 has two opened positions. The first is for video calls and the phone is not fully opened yet. We usually call this a “sitting” position since in that position the phone is made to “sit” on your desk while you are making a video call. If you go all the way, it will seamlessly open entirely.

Semi-opened and fully opened N71

The front panel consists of grey plastic and shelters the external display silver frame. On top of the display is located a NOKIA sign and below it is the functional key. This key is used for silencing or rejecting incoming calls, pausing and playing music, etc. The camera lens and the flash LED are beneath the silver frame.

Nokia N71 front • Camera lens and LED flash

The back of the phone has a very clean design and only has a white NOKIA sign on the very top and the battery cover with its release clip. The bottom of the back side of the phone is bordered with silver plastic. The battery and the cover are one whole set – the capacity of the Li-Ion battery itself is 970 mAh. It is integrated with the plastic cover with the use of plastic clips. The SIM card slot is in the top part of the battery bed and the card needs to be pushed inside the phone’s body and then be pressed by the battery.

Nokia N71 back • Under the battery cover • The SIM card slot

The left side of the phone is for the loud speaker grill and the Infrared port. The port is on the top and the grill is located on the bottom. The right lateral side of the phone is empty. The bottom of the closed device holds the On/Off/Profiles button. It is located on the front panel’s bottom. The back panel’s bottom doesn’t have anything on it. The top of N71 is reserved for the clamshell mechanism which is in silver, the Pop-Port connector and the miniSD memory card slot. The slot is protected by a tiny plastic which I, myself, consider unstable and easy to lose.

Nokia N71 left side • Right side • Bottom • On/Off/Profiles button

When opened, the phone’s top part consists of the main speaker on the top, a small N71 sign on the left, the video call VGA camera on the right and the main display grey frame. The bottom part of the opened device is reserved for the keypad and the microphone on its bottom. They keypad is divided in two.

Nokia N71 opened • VGA video calls camera • Keypad of Nokia N71

SMS is just fine

The keypad of Nokia N71 is practically good. It is separated in two parts, top and bottom. The top part is with the functional and navigation keys. Alone in the very top is the Multimedia button. When pressed, this key brings up the Multimedia Menu. Below it is the four-way navigation key with confirmation button in its middle. This is quite confusing as the four ways aren’t easy to press without special effort and you may press different way by mistake. Surrounding the navigation key are the two soft keys and the red and green receiver keys On the next row are located the Pencil, Menu and C correction buttons.

N71 keypad • Top functional part of the keypad

The bottom part of the keypad is for the alphanumeric keys. They are very well elaborated and can be easily distinguished in the dark. All keys on the keypad, except for the navigation key, are made of grey plastic and leave good touch impressions. The four-way navigation key is made of silver metal. The keypad backlighting is great, except there is one interesting issue. The backlight illuminates all buttons except the top Multimedia key.

Keypad backlighting

Good, even great

Nokia N71 has a 256K colors display with 320 x 240 pixels resolution. The manufacturer, however, has already shown to the public better displays in their previous models N90, N80 & E60 to say for example. This display performs very well both in good and bad light conditions. It is large enough to enable the phone to display its features. The displayed picture is vivid and sharp and the backlighting of the display is very good.

N71 display • Display backlighting

When active, the external display is 65K colors with 96 x 68 pixels resolution and displays the date and time and the operator name. When inactive, it displays the time but the clock is rather illegible. It can also display the played track if you are listening to music and shows the caller’s number and picture if any when receiving calls. Missed calls and received messages are also displayed.

External display

Network signal reception is perfect and sound quality during calls is at a great level.

Dialing a number • Calling somebody

S60, the IIIrd

Series 60 3rd edition user interface is not an innovation anymore. It is well known from the reviews of Nokia N80, N91 and E60. Nokia N71 is another smartphone with Symbian 9.1 which runs on the S60 3rd edition user interface. The active stand-by display of the phone shows the network signal strength, date & time, operator name and battery level on its top row. Below it is a row of the most used applications and a list of organizer and calls information like calendar tasks, notes and missed calls and received messages. The labels of the applications assigned to the two soft keys are located in the very bottom of the display.

Nokia N71 main active display

The main menu is available in two views: matrix grid and listed view. The matrix grid is based of 3 x 4 icons and the listed view shows 5 icons at a time. The sub-menus are both in grid and listed view but most of them cannot be changed. The Multimedia menu is another option in the phone and can be brought up by pressing the Multimedia button. It opens a four-way animated menu with four assigned applications that can be changed by the user’s preference. Nokia N71 performs very well in matter of speed. There aren’t any major lags in the phone response and that makes working with the phone an easy job.

Main menu in two different themes • My own sub-menu • Multimedia menu

The phone has 10 MB internal memory and a 128 MB miniSD card in the package (market dependent) for expanding the memory. As the phone supports MP3/AAC/MPEG4 file formats, it can be used as a music player but it is not what it is made to do. It is mostly for satisfying the needs of the users who want their phone to have a bit more than just the basic features of the modern mobile phone.

miniSD memory card slot

Symbian phonebook

N71 phonebook is the same as in any other Nokia Symbian phone. It uses the shared internal memory of the phone and has almost 11 MB as a limit. Contacts can be ordered either by first or last name and are searched by gradually typing the contact’s name letter by letter. They can also be organized in groups but cannot be used as a calls filter.

Phonebook capacity • Browsing the phonebook

There is a large amount of available fields which can be assigned to a contact. Starting with Title, First & Last name, Suffix, Company, Job title, Nickname, Mobile, Office, Home phone numbers, Video call phone numbers, Internet telephone, PTT, Fax, Pager, email addresses, web addresses, etc.

Assigning different fields

Personalized pictures and ringtones are supported as well. When a contact of your phonebook is calling you, a picture of your choice is displayed on the screen next to his name.

Receiving a call from a contact

Viewing contact details

The log

Nokia N71 calls log is separated in four tabs: Recent calls, Dialed Numbers, Received calls, Missed calls. The Recent calls tab contains all calls made with the phone in the last 30 days while the other tabs shows the last 10 calls in every category. Every record of a call shows the call duration, date and time of the execution of the call and the number you’ve talked with.

Calls log

Messaging all-in-one

The messaging menu of Nokia N71 has an Inbox for all SMS, MMS, EMS messages and files received through Bluetooth or Infrared. The received emails are stored in a separate inbox. Writing messages is very easy with N71 as the keypad is comfortable and allows the user to write fast. There is a T9 dictionary to assist the writing process. There is a character counter in top part of the display which shows the characters left until the message will be divided in two or more parts. Next to the characters number there is a number in brackets which tells you the numbers of messages that will be sent. The messages editor and reader display up to 7 rows en bloc.

Inbox • Reading a message • Writing a message

The email client works very well and handles POP3, IMAP and SMTP protocols. N71 downloads and opens attachments seamlessly. The email inbox displays the new messages highlighted so you would know which emails are still unread.

Reading email • Email inbox • Writing an email

Music in the background

As in previous S60 3rd edition Nokia smartphones, N71 offers the same music player with an equalizer and playlist support. The phone allows music to be played in the background as the track is displayed on the active stand-by display below the calendar information.

Music player • Running in background

The phone also has FM radio but you have to plug in the head speakers in order to listen to the radio as their cable serves as an antenna. The radio is very easy and intuitive to use and can remember your favorite stations once you’ve set them.

FM radio

Great results, great performance

Nokia N71 has a very good 2 megapixel camera. The camera application is very similar to the one in Nokia N80, just adjusted for portrait shooting and in many aspects the N71 camera is a 2 megapixel version of the N80 camera. In fact, it is a lot more convenient to use the Nokia N71 camera for sightseeing for example. You will have to start the camera application only once. When you are not shooting, you can just close the clamshell. If you need it again, you can just open the clamshell and the camera is ready to take the picture immediately. We didn’t had Nokia N80 along with N71 to compare the performance, but in all camera operations, N71 seemed faster – this is easily explainable – Nokia N71 has to work with smaller images (2 MP vs. 3 MP) and also has lower resolution display, less pixels to draw. However, Nokia N71 lacks the macro mode we can find on N80.

Camera interface

There are a lot of shooting modes like Portrait, Landscape, Sport, Text, which is very convenient. The exposure compensation and the white balance can be adjusted without pressing too many buttons. Of course, you can select to store your photos in lower resolution or with higher compression. A LED flash should help you in shooting close objects in the dark.

Using LED flash in complete darkness

The quality of the Nokia N71 photos is a pleasant surprise – low noise (look at the sky in the samples), true colors and high dynamic range for a phone (no over exposure). We notice a little underexposure in the N71 photos, but this is definitely a better approach than blowing the highlights, it’s really easy to adjust the exposure later on the PC. If you like your photos brighter in the first place, you can always use the exposure compensation.

For everything except macro shots Nokia N71 can rival the top rated 2 megapixel cameras of Sony Ericsson K750 and friends. You can see how K750 performs at the same scenes in our 3 megapixel shootout, K750 was a honorable referee there.

Full size photo samples

Photos resampled to 1024 x 768 pixels

At highest setting Nokia N71 can shoot video in MP4 format and CIF resolution (352 x 288 pixels). The quality of the video is on par with N80 and it is a lot better than what we usually get in the phones. Capturing in 3GP format is also possible. The digital zoom can be used during shooting, the exposure and the white balance can be adjusted.

Video camera interface

Video samples

Gallery

You can look at your photos with the help of the Gallery application. It uses the same rotating view as in Nokia N80, but in portrait mode. The thumbnails of the pictures are read ahead and cached. Once read, all operations within the Gallery are very fast.

Gallery • Viewing a photo in normal and landscape mode

Seamlessly connect to almost anything

Nokia N71 has Bluetooth, Infrared and USB connectivity options and they work so easily that you can connect to almost anything that supports these standards. There are applications to install a Bluetooth keyboard and use it with the phone and there is another application for setting a printer to print files from N71.

Connectivity menu

Synchronization with PC is seamless with the Nokia PC Suite. There is also a Nokia Xpress Transfer application for fast transfer of files from your phone to your PC or backwards.

Perfect browsing

The web browser of Nokia N71 is the same as in N80 and E60, but as the display has lower resolution, N71 displays less on its screen. It works great and offers powerful features. There is a mouse cursor that can be navigated easily, you can switch between different pages and you can zoom the part of the page you are in interested in. The browser supports flash clips and most Java scripts. An intriguing fact is that Nokia N71 (as well as N80 and E60) has two different browsers. One of them is this advanced one and the other is an old Symbian browser, which was used in earlier models.

Nokia N71 web browser

Multi-tasking

Nokia N71 has an Organizer menu and a Calendar icon in the main menu. This is quite confusing but is not unusual. The Calendar has Monthly, Weekly and Daily view. You can assign Meeting, Anniversary, Memo and To-do tasks in the Calendar. You can also put alarms on those assignments.

Calendar: monthky & weekly views

The phone can open office Word and Excel documents but cannot edit them. You can only zoom in and out and read the files. There is a dual clock application in the phone. You can set two different times and dates in two time zones. You can set alarms from the Clock application.

Word document • Excel document

The Organizer menu consists of Notes, Converter, Calculator and Recorder applications. The Converter converts Currencies, Area, Energy, Length, Mass, Power, Pressure, Temperature, Time, Velocity and Volume. The calculator is very simple and easy to use. Regrettably, the Recorder has a one minute limit for voice records. This seems quite illogical since the phone has enough internal memory and a memory card slot.

Calculator • Recorder

Mobile security and blogging

An intriguing thing is that the Nokia N71 has an anti-virus application. It is the F-Security application which protects your phone from mobile virus attacks. Another interesting application is the Lifeblog feature which is for mobile blogging which is becoming increasingly popular nowadays.

Imaging and My own sub-menus

3D Snake

Nokia N71 has two preinstalled games, Snake and Card Deck. The Card Deck game is a pack of popular card games like Klondike and Golf. The Snake game is a new 3D labyrinth of the popular Nokia Snake game. We must admit that it offers quite an amusing and addictive gameplay.

Card Deck • Snake

Controversial choice

Nokia N71 definitely has its great sides and can offer much to the end users but lacks design touch and due to its bulky size will repulse many customers. Of course, there are people who enjoy bigger phones and will like the new Symbian Nokia but probably for the majority of us N71 won’t be the first choice of preference.

Nokia N71 photos

Nokia N71 secondary display screenshots

Nokia N71 main display screenshots

Nokia N71 sample camera photos

Source : http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_n71-review-92p6.php

Nokia N71

A year or so ago, you knew where you were with a Nokia S60 smartphone – it would be about a certain size and be a ‘candy bar’, with later models even foregoing a wacky keypad design. Since then, we’ve had the ‘transforming’ N90, the gullwing E70 and the thumb-keyboarded, wide-screened E61, to name but three. The N71, then, doesn’t come as so much of a shock.

I was going to write about this being Nokia’s first S60 clamshell device, but then I remembered the 6260. And the N90 itself, each of which could be configured in clamshell mode. But this is a true clamshell, in that it can only be used in this one form factor. As with other clamshells, there’s the advantage of more screen and keypad real estate, and a better position during calls, at the expense of slightly greater thickness and (probably) fragility.

First impressions of the N71 are good, the phone is certainly diminutive, measuring only 94mm long, including the bulky hinge, and weighing just 133g. It’s nicely constructed in black and silver plastic and the hinge seems sturdy. There’s no sprung flip action here, you’ll need two hands to open the clamshell, which may be a problem for some people – single handed use is one advantage of the traditional candy bar design. Opening the device is enough to auto-answer an incoming call, an expected but still nice to have feature.

Before opening the N71, you’ll have noticed the one large external button and a small 96×68 pixel cover display. The latter is in colour and displays simple graphics and text to indicate system messages (e.g. missed calls), device status, any currently playing music track (with pause/play assigned to the button) and, with a long push of the button, a backlit clock and date. The cover user interface is simple and effective. There’s also a tiny (and annoyingly easy to push by mistake) PushToTalk button on the left of the N71, next to its infrared window, should your network support PTT, and the required (and getting ever smaller and more fiddly) power/profile button, here located on the very end of the device.

One reason for the clean lines of the N71 is that the power socket, Pop-port connector and miniSD expansion slot are all hidden away underneath the main hinge. Packing so much electronics into a few mm of plastic is an impressive feat of miniaturisation, but it does make removing the connectivity cable and extracting a miniSD card somewhat fiddlier than usual. The Pop-port is protected by a rubber cover. On balance this is a good idea, although it’s not tethered and power users (who connect up often) will probably end up losing the cover, either by accident or ‘on purpose’.

Open the clamshell (it tends to ‘click’ open at 135 and 155 degrees) and you’ll see a slightly larger than usual S60 display, framed in a stylish metal surround. The colours are excellent and the text clearer than usual because of the screen resolution used. This is one of the new (to Nokia) QVGA screens and it makes a big difference. Opposite the display is a spacious keypad, although the narrow and clicky number keys and pimpled navigator take a little getting used to. There’s also the mental leap to make, associating the two soft keys on the bottom half of the clamshell with the legends shown on screen a good 3cm above.

Above the main screen is the VGA video call camera, plus a light sensor for adjusting screen brightness and keypad backlight. The main camera is the same unit as in the established N70 and you’ll have seen it in the photos on the front of the N71, beneath the cover display. There’s no protection from knocks, scratches or fingerprints, unfortunately, especially important given the number of times you’re going to be pressing up against the lens in the course of pressing the clock button.

Booting up the N71 reveals S60 3rd Edition, as seen on most other smartphones reviewed recently. The interface and applications look good on the QVGA screen in the N71’s and there’s less sense of wrong fonts and layout than on the landscape-oriented E61. I’m guessing that QVGA-portrait was fairly central in the 3rd Edition redesign and it shows. Yes, there are still several different fonts in use, but nothing leaps out as horribly out of place.

One enhancement which is new is a revised function for the multimedia key. On the S60 2nd Edition N70, this just launches the application of your choice (by default, Gallery), on the N71 it brings up a five way navigator-led shortcut, as shown below. I was worried that it now took two keypresses to get to the centrally shown application, but one long press on the button bypasses the new shortcut screen and ‘does the right thing’.

Music player works as well here as any any other recent Symbian OS-powered smartphone, with only very occasional background drop-outs when starting a particular demanding application. Production N71s are apparently supplied with the Nokia headset with integral 3.5mm jack, for plugging in your own higher quality headphones, though the set supplied in the box are adequate for all but audiophiles. As with other S60 3rd Edition devices, there’s full Media Player synchronisation and WMA support (plus USB mass transfer mode, all at high USB 2.0 speeds). As with the N70,and fast becoming commonplace on Nokia S60 smartphones, there’s a stereo FM radio too, although reception isn’t that sensitive.

Web on the N71 is Nokia’s Open Source browser, with some of the same issues as we’ve previously reported, in terms of trying too hard to lay complex pages out as on a desktop, but at least with the slightly higher screen resolution here the problem’s not so acute as on (for example) the N91. For some reason, I couldn’t get GPRS working on the review machine (even after a hard reset) – there is a degree of automatic set up in modern S60 devices, based on the SIM that’s inserted, but the settings seem to centre on contract SIMs rather than pre-pay ones. The N71 worked fine with Rafe’s contract card, with screens shown above for general web browsing and text-based RSS feed reading.

With extra screen real estate to spare, the interface to the still and video camera has been tweaked for the good, with light and flash settings available underneath the preview image rather than being a pop-up. Image quality is on a par with the quality 2 megapixel output from the N70, with TV-useable video capture (352×288 pixels, 15fps). There’s the same intelligent use of digital zoom, too, with the software not letting you go past 2x zoom by default and with warnings in the manual about overriding this setting and using higher zoom factors (with appropriate reductions in quality). Image editing (from Gallery) has been improved (compared to the S60 2nd Edition Nseries devices), with effects such as ‘Red eye reduction’ and ‘Cartoonise’, although image processing on the smartphone is still far more restrictive than doing the same back on your desktop.

There are no surprises on the software front – the viewer component of Quickoffice is provided for displaying email attachments, the terrific Snakes game is in the ROM, as is the latest version of Nokia’s Mobile Search utility. Curiously, there’s a shortcut to downloading and installing F-Secure’s ‘Anti-virus’ software, which is strange since S60 3rd Edition, with its restrictions on unsigned applications, is immune to malware by definition.

As with all other S60 3rd Edition smartphones, I have to warn you that there’s still an issue about availability of 3rd party applications (ported from S60 2nd Edition), but this will ease as time goes on.

Battery life on the N71 is excellent, with daily recharges not needed unless you’re a heavy camera user. The snap-in battery pack in the rear of the device holds a pleasant surprise, in that it’s simply a standard BL-5C (as used in a million other Nokia phones) encased in a special moulding. When the time comes to replace it, or if you simply want to carry an emergency spare, it’s easy enough to snap it out and put the new one in.

The Nokia N71 may not stand out as an obvious star in Nokia’s current (somewhat mouthwatering) S60 3rd Edition line up, but it has a unique form factor and a lot to recommend it.  For fans of the clamshell phone, to have 99% of the functionality of the best-selling N70 packed in, plus a larger screen and a cutting edge OS, the N71 is the one to get and I have no hesitation in recommending it.

Side by side with the older 6260, plus the 6670 and N70

Source : http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/reviews/item/Nokia_N71.php