The E61 is not a Smart Phone
Oh the joys of never being happy with a PDA… As many of you will know I am currently using a Nokia E61 and have been for the past 3 weeks. In that time I have not experienced one crash, I have charged it only three times and it has worked wonderfully for email and web in particular.
The calendar is awful, the in built contacts application is even worse and the time it takes to enter information is prohibitive. I would say that the E61 is not a Smart Phone in it’s current form. Sure there are very few third party applications available at this time for Symbian S60 3rd Edition and I have spent some time looking at what is already available for the E61 Blog and some of it is very good. There is a problem though in that a lot of the good applications fall into the same genres- system tweaks, weather, JAVA apps and games and that’s about your lot. The problem is that a lot of what is already available is not very good at all and when I look further afield at the third party Symbian applications that could potentially be ported to 3rd edition I’m not exactly impressed. There is an awful lot of crap Symbian applications on the market and most of the games are laughable. This opinion is formed from comparing the Symbian third party market to Palm and Windows Mobile software offerings.
Back to the device- it is wonderful at what it does and as a connected mobile voice and email device it can’t be bettered but if you are looking for a variety of uses such as finance management and data collection my advice would be to steer clear of Symbian altogether.
The other day my PC died badly and at this time it is still not fixed. The problem is that it is tax return time and most of the information I need is on that PC. I have data on my Treo 650 and on paper and after a couple of hours the return is just about complete. Even if the PC had worked paper records would still have been prominent in completing this document and it has dawned on me more and more recently that ‘paper works’ and it works well. It may not be as fast as a PC and PDA but since using the E61 paper has figured more and more at work for me and I’m starting to see the benefits.
The Treo 650 can handle finance with ease and with Note Studio is a superb data collector and viewer but it is horribly unstable and unable to cope well with GPRS and web browsing (my experiences with three different models). It is also the easiest PDA to use by far and probably the only one that can be used almost completely one handed. It’s still on my desk but won’t knock the E61 of it’s perch just yet.
On to the main reason for this article- the Treo 750v. You get Windows Mobile with Treo navigation and this on the surface is a near perfect combination. I will definately be trying one soon even if the lack of WiFi, the 240 x 240 screen and the looks are a bit of a turn off. Potentially this could be the perfect device for me.
There will be a minor issue with compatible applications due to the screen pixelage but nothing in comparison to 3rd edition S60. Maybe I am just being impatient waiting for applications to become compatible but I have a nagging feeling that there are not enough Symbian developers out there with the resources to give that true Smart Phone experience to devices like the E61. I love the hardware more than any other device I have used but am concerned that ultimately the software offerings will not lift it from a ‘great connected mobile phone’ to a Smart Phone.
Pocket PC Thoughts have posted some pictures of the 
