Original E71 on left, AT&T E71x on right

It seems a bit silly to do a full hands-on of the just announced Nokia E71x for AT&T, seeing as it’s essentially identical to the original E71 – which we’ve already given a thorough reviewing. Besides the obvious color difference (Black on black, rather than silver on white), the changes are somewhat trivial: it has Feature Pack 3 rather than Feature Pack 2 (which is just about the same thing, from the end user’s standpoint), AT&T’s standard service suite, and it lacks the FM radio of the x-less edition.

But boy, is it pretty.

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It was only a few weeks back when Nokia announced that a model of the E63 with North American 3G friendly internals was on the way, and it’s already found its way to the shelves. While it doesn’t appear that Nokia has gotten around to putting it online yet, the flagship Nokia stores in Chicago and New York are reporting that they just received their first shipment and are letting them go for $279.99 a piece.

The North American model packs in quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900 Mhz) and UMTS (850/1900mhz), so it should fire right up on AT&T’s (or, if you’re a bit further up north, Rogers) 3G network. Besides the radio change, it matches spec-for-spec with the international version Nokia launched a few months ago, which is in turn a lighter-spec’d and easier-on-the-wallet homage to the E71.

The E63 comes in blue and red, and we’re not sure which is in stock – so make sure to call ahead if you’ve got a particular hue in mind.

[via Symbian-Guru]

If you’re the type of person who lives in Europe (a “European”), you can always go with the E63, although the performance problems I encountered in the E71 would be exacerbated in that little guy.

[Mobilesyrup via Uber, Unwired]

I’ve been putting this one off for a while, but it’s time you youngsters learned about this lovely little device. It’s the latest in Nokia’s E series of smartphones, and as you will learn by clicking above and/or below, it’s a bit of a conundrum. By the way, that part of the video review is supposed to be boring.

First, the good news.

The Good News

This phone is a magnificent piece of work. Everything about it screams “quality” from the texture of the keys to the styling and heft. Everyone I saw, be they users of iPhones, BlackBerries, flip phones or what have you, everyone thought it was a beautiful piece of hardware. It’s well constructed, uses a fair amount of real metal, and has a weightiness to it that seems out of keeping with its slight frame. And it is slight: it’s nearly as thin as my old Samsung Trace, and it’s narrower than a BlackBerry.

So with limited space, you’d think there would be compromises. If there are, I didn’t notice them — at least after a little use. If I’m honest, the keyboard could be a little larger, but it didn’t affect my typing once I figured out the layout. Trouble is, there isn’t a staggered layout like a regular QWERTY: Z is directly below A, which is annoying until you get used to it. Also, the modifier keys are small and right next to each other, so you may find yourself typing a capital letter instead of a number every once in a while. Still, I’m being more hard on it than it deserves. It feels great, and I know I could get even more words per minute out of it if I tried a little harder (we bloggers are a lazy lot). Locking and unlocking the phone was a little more trouble than I’d like, but it was nice having a main button for all major actions — the top button allows you to change modes, turn it off or on, hit up airplane mode, lock the keypad and more.

The screen is very sharp and fairly bright, and does that thing where you can see it in the sunlight, but it looks kind of weird. I’m not winning any prizes for eloquence there, but you know what I mean. It works. The graphics were occasionally not up to the screen’s capabilities; the 3.5G indicator especially was a bit fuzzy, and I learned to recognize it by its indistinctness.

Basically, all the hardware and industrial design aspects of this phone are outstanding.

So much for the good news.

The Other News
Is it bad news if the phone is too good for its OS? It is if that’s the only OS you can use on it. Let’s be real here: Symbian is the old guard. It’s been retrofitted and retrofitted and retrofitted, and now the capabilities of phones are just beyond what can be made convenient in S60. Support is there, certainly, for every function of the E71, but it’s not elegant and it’s certainly not fun. The list of things this phone can do is like a page long, but each thing has its own page-long description of how to get to it, configure it, and so on.

I’m getting off track and criticizing S60 here, but this phone deserves more! Switching modes is supposed to counterbalance the fact that you can’t fit everything you want to do on one home screen. But that’s basically admitting that this is too much phone for this OS.

One more thing: messaging. Setting up e-mail was a breeze in the built-in e-mail app, but oh my god is it slow. Even in 3.5G zones it would take ages — ages! — just to open messaging, go to my inbox, and open a single short message. Configuring it to take advantage of different wi-fi spots was annoying; you don’t want it to ask every time, of course, but you also don’t want it to just fail when the default isn’t available. A popular replacement app, Seven, worked all right but is still not reliable enough to use full-time, and having it on true push tends to kill the battery due to how long the thing wants to take to check a message.

Other things worked great: GPS worked like a charm most of the time, although I’d recommend Google Maps over the built-in maps program (which is passable). The browser is old school but actually was pretty quick. Browsing was easy, relatively fast, and downloads are blazing when you have good coverage. Installing apps is easier than finding them, especially when the E71 isn’t totally supported yet by many developers, but I found plenty of good stuff. Tethering was easy and browsing via the phone was pretty fast — way faster than checking e-mail.

So what’s the bottom line?
I think I can pretty easily recommend this phone to anyone who uses Symbian. It’s certainly the loveliest phone out there running S60 and a worthwhile upgrade from the earlier entries in the E-series. Trouble is, it’s difficult to find. I think AT&T might be picking it up, but it’s still going to be expensive as hell. So if you’re looking to invest in one last Symbian phone before moving on to the next big thing, this is really your best option.

One week after “some other phone” was finally revealed, Nokia today took the wraps off two phones that had been clogging the rumor mill for quite some time. Yes, the S60-based E71 and E66 are now officially real, and are officially for middle management types. Two words: Microsoft Exchange. Put those MBAs to good use!

The E71, above, is available in both black and white, like those cookies bakeries sell. The QWERTY device has a front-facing camera (for video conferencing!) and built-in 3.2-megapixel camera. Seeing as though it’s a cellphone aimed at businesses, I don’t see what value the digital camera adds, but the benefits of the video camera should be obvious. Talk time is said to be around 10.5 hours on plain ol’ GSM, and 4.5 hours when in 3G mode. That’s good, right? I can’t imagine Mr. Junior Business Executive being away from the office or an outlet for much longer than that.

The smaller E66 is a slider with much the same specs, including the all-important Exchange support.

Nokia’s really promoting the phones’ e-mail capabilities, for in addition to Exchange support, the Finland-based cellphone giant worked with the likes of Google and Yahoo! to support Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, and so on. More than 1,000 ISPs should find that their e-mail works just fine on the phones.

As for when you’ll be able to buy one (or both!), looks like July is it. Both will retail, before carrier subsidies and whatnot, for €350, or $541. Yikes the exchange rate hurts.

Is that really a Nokia? It looks so good. Yep, that’s the E71 smartphone in the flesh. No clue when it’s being launched, but I have a feeling it should be sometime soon. In the meantime let’s enjoy the pics.

This is a high-end smartphone with ultra-high-end features, like an autofocus camera, super-fast 3G data, GPS, and WiFi, all in a seriously thin form factor.

The full QWERTY keyboard is for us heavy texters. We’re not sure if there will be carrier subsidy, if so it’ll likely be via AT&T to replace the aged E62 that AT&T discontinued some months ago. We’ll keep an eye on this one this week, as many Nokia fans have been waiting for this flat handset.