Don’t think of the Nokia E71 as one of the world’s smallest Qwerty smartphones (even though it is), think of it as an afternoon out of the office every week. The E71 has everything you need to turn a sunny deckchair or bustling pavement café table into an extension of your cubicle – without the possibility of being called in to a sweaty conference room for a surprise meeting.
Its stainless steel overcoat shouts build quality, a fact that’s echoed by its swift, stutter-free operation, even with multiple applications running. The E71 can read, modify and create standard Office documents on the move, and partnered with Nokia Messaging makes emailing on the move a totally fuss free afair. It even lets you access data on your home (or office) computer with Files on Ovi. The latest 3G, HSDPA, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connections mean you should never be without some way to connect to the connect to the world around you and tap into location based services such as Nokia Maps, while a 3.2MP camera, media player and A-GPS navigation do the same for real life.
What we say
What they say
“It takes a lot to get us excited but the E71 has done it. This thing, in our opinion, is the best phone Nokia has made to date”
The Boy Genius Report
If you only do one thing
Work through your monthly sales figures or put together a presentation with no more than two thumbs and the E71’s effortless Qwerty keyboard, before emailing it off to your team. They’ll think you’ve been chained to your desk for hours (not a few minutes in the park)
Miscellany
Origins of the Qwerty keyboard
Never underestimate the importance of being first to market. The Qwerty-format keyboard, with its awkward reaches and peculiar positioning of the most common letters, has been the bane of student typists for over a century. It arose from an early typewriter design, by Christopher Sholes in 1874, that needed to slow typists down in order to reduce jammed levers that could ruin correspondence.
Adopted by market leaders Remington and Underwood, the Qwerty keyboard quickly grew to dominate the market. By the time August Dvorak designed his high-speed, ergonomic keyboard in 1932, and demonstrated its superiority by showing that children could learn to type with it in a third of the time of a Qwerty keyboard, it was too late. Even the US Navy couldn’t fight the tide – its order for thousands of Dvorak’s typewriters was vetoed by the Treasury on the grounds of, well, simply fitting in.