Like most people, watching Steve Jobs unveil the original Apple iPhone was something that stuck in my memory, in particular for the way he utterly (and somewhat unfairly) dismissed the current generation of qwerty-thumb-keyboarded smartphones, declaring them to have “too much plastic”. His point was that you’d get on better having the whole front surface as display and let individual applications use the real estate as they saw fit. An innovative notion and one which works very well for the iPhone. But the continuing popularity of the Blackberry/Treo form factor shows that, especially when someone’s banging out text messages and emails all day, in trains, buses, walking down the road, you really can’t beat the tactile nature and satisfaction of a real keyboard – however small.

Steve Jobs’ original comparison slide showed the Nokia E62, the model of the day in the USA, which suffered from low RAM, a slowish processor and a fiddly joystick. The E61i then appeared, to all intents and purposes a bit of a cosmetic upgrade, with thinner form and a 2 megapixel camera, but the core performance problem remained. The E51 and E90 appeared, with new styling, with S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 under the hood and snappier performance all round, plus up to date media codecs. And now we have the E71, combining (hopefully) the best of the E61 form factor with the size (almost) and speed of the E51 and the software package from the E90 plus some new tricks of its own – the perfect smartphone?

After all, you can bang out SMS/emails on this device, but there’s a lot more under the hood and the E71 looks to be a fairly good all rounder. The S60 implementation used is still a little under-powered at times, most notably when opening images and playing back videos, but it’s fine for everyday productivity and general mobile computing.

In some ways the E71 is the iPhone’s nemesis – using almost the identical dimensions in a totally different way, for a totally different set of users. The iPhone excels at media consumption (Music/photos/video/web), while the E71’s strengths are in media creation (typing documents, Office work, camera, camcorder, and so on – the usual Nokia/S60 strengths). Both devices can do most of what the other does, just not as well. The attempted crossover is evidenced by the iPhone 2 platform adding enterprise features while the E71 now plays DRMed WMA music, etc. Then there are the starkly different form factors. And the different target markets (personal vs company use). Add in the elegantly-simple- but-not-as-deep UI of the iPhone compared to the useable but-you-need-to-be-fairly-tech-savvy-to-find-everything approach for S60 on the E71, and I can only emphasise once again that they’re polar opposites.
From E61 to E71

As you can see, the form factor’s been on a diet over the last two years – the E71 has been a long time coming but the new size (112mm high by 57mm wide by a mere 11mm thick) is a huge improvement overall.

source: allaboutsymbian.com