When the Palm Treo 600 first came out in 2003 and I became the proud owner of one, I thought then that I had found the ideal gadget. The Treo 600 was one of the earliest of the better integrated PDA-cum-mobile phones and I thought it was in general wonderfully conceived and executed. The one criticism that I had of it - and it is a fairly major one which eventually led to my no longer using it - was the relatively poorly built hardware. My unit, like many others, developed a buzzing sound problem in the speaker that eventually became so bad that the phone function was unusable. I stopped using the Treo in late-2005 and went back to a relatively basic mobile phone, the LG U880.

Since then I’ve stayed away from smartphones. I learned over the years that smartphones and PDAs, particularly those powered by the Windows operating system, are frequently replete with problems. Manufacturers from a PDA-background find it difficult to successfully integrate a phone function without crashing the system. Manufacturers with a mobile-background never quite seem to be able to offer proper PDA functions in their devices. In general, most smartphones suffer from instability and the need for frequent “re-boots”. Aside from these issues, for a long while, I had not seen any device that met a minimum set of features that I wanted in a device, not since the Treo 600. While the O2 XDAs and the i-mates had most of the features I wanted, I wasn’t particularly enamoured with their aesthetics. The fact that they were powered by Windows didn’t help. While I was really attracted to the Nokia N95 (and the Nokia N93), the absence of an in-built full keyboard stopped me. Finally, given my past experience with the Treo, I didn’t want to go back there, not with the sum of money involved.

With that as background, I recently needed to get a new mobile for various reasons and my best mate alerted me to the Nokia E61i. After some research, I decided to take the plunge back into the world of smart phones and I must say that I’ve been very happy with my decision.

The Nokia E61i is in many ways a continuation of the wonderfully conceptualised integration that first appeared on the Treo 600 but in a much better hardware. Other than the built-in WiFi and Bluetooth, there really is no new function that the Nokia E61i can do that the Treo didn’t already do. In many ways, that’s a testament to how little technological features and/or how little consumer demands and needs with respect to such devices have changed over the years. That said, whatever the Treo could do, the Nokia E61i can do so much better - that I believe is a testament to how much the power of technology has advanced in the intervening years.

Some of the things that I love so far about the Nokia E61i include:

• the built-in browser that displays websites “normally”
• the ability to get the E61i to check my emails at regular intervals using my mobile provider’s free email retrieval service
• the ability to chat on MSN using either Fring or MSN’s official application for the mobile
• the ability to make voice-calls (and chat) via my account on the Skype network using Fring
• using Nokia Maps (now offline but hopefully eventually with GPS when I go buy an external dongle)
• automatic synchronisation between the E61i and Outlook (contacts, calendar, notes and tasks) on my computer via bluetooth
• being able to access Facebook, GMail, and Flickr on a whim…!

Yes… the Nokia E61i is a nice phone… and I’ve so far been very happy with it…

p/s about 70% of this post was written on the Nokia E61i while I was on a long and boring bus ride.

Posted on September 5th, 2007 by jl
Filed under: Tech