Choosing the right business phone
I am in the market for a new business phone. The company will buy me a new one, once I have decided which one I want. I of course can’t refuse a free phone upgrade, so the hunt has begun.
I currently have a Sony Ericsson P990i, which has served me quite well, but lacks some essential features. Its qwerty keyboard is barely usable, but I’m glad that it’s there.
The perfect phone should have a proper calendar, where it’s easy to plan a week or two ahead. It must also support having tasks in the calendar, which the P990i does not do. (Third-party application Handy day does it, but not very nicely.) It must also be easy to move meetings and tasks around in a weekly view.
For rapid text entry a qwerty keyboard is necessary, with big enough buttons for the thumbs. Other features such as wireless LAN, a good web browser, SIP phone and a proper email application is also needed.
Not many email applications seems to do a good job with email threading or anything at all to make it easy to glance the mailbox. The support for client certificates is also necessary for the business mailbox, but it seems that not many phones have this functionality either.
I have glanced long and hard at the Nokia N95, which seems to have all features including support for client certificates for email servers. The big downside however, is the lack of a proper qwerty keyboard.
The other phone on my list is the Nokia E61i, which is a proper business phone. It has a nice qwerty keyboard, and the email view seems to be quite nice. It is however becoming old, and lots of features in the N95 does not exist in the E61i — mostly the more general consumer-oriented applications. There is for example built-in support for video podcasting in the N95, which is extremely handy when commuting and traveling.
There are of course other devices such as the HTC TyTN. First of all it’s running the Windows Mobile operating system which I’m not very fond of, and it is very thick so it won’t fit into any pocket. So much for pocket PC.
Sony Ericsson has released the P1, but that is essentially the same phone as the P990i, and they have removed the proper qwerty keyboard.
The N95 using the E61i hardware seems to be the best thing right now, but waiting for that is not feasible. This leaves E61i as the winner for now, but time will tell if it stands up to the continued phone research these coming days.
Edit: First impressions of the Nokia E61i.
I bought a Nokia E61i a week ago, but I can’t make up my mind whether i like it or not…
I like:
* the keyboard. The first day or two it was hard to use efficiently, but after I’ve been using it for about a week I’m really starting to become friends with it.
* the display is really nice with it’s 320×240 pixels resolution, and I’m impressed with the camera taking pictures at a resolution of 1600×1200 pixles (my previous phone did not have a camera, so I’m not used to such fancy stuff hence easily impressed
* the e-mail client was easy to set-up to connect to an IMAP server over SSL/TLS (mostly following your HOWTO from April
with a snake-oil certificate, but since the WLAN sucks I’ve only used a few times and haven’t really explored the e-mail client fully. At first glance it looks like it’s usable but not excellent…
* PuTTY for Symbian OS is really neat to connect to a *nix box via SSH. Works nice even a regular 3G data connection (does not come with the phone but can be downloaded – http://s2putty.sourceforge.net/)
* The calender has a decent (not detailed) overview per week and month (however you screen shot of handy day looks better), and the phone can display upcoming meetings and to do items on the “front page” – a working combination!
You can set a priority (high, normal, low) and an alarm for the to do item. I sync the PIM application with Lotus Notes at work using some Nokia software for Win XP which simply works. I don’t know if it will sync with Thunderbird, Evolution or similar (I did not have timer to test yet).
I dislike:
* Nokia’s WLAN implementation. The phone has difficulties connecting to some access point unless you disable all power saving and turn the transmit power up to 100 mW resulting in a flat battery within a day. I can’t really figure out if my unit is broken or if the WLAN implementation just is as poor as I experience it, but it definitely disappoints me… Connecting via the 3G network work really well, but Telia prices on data transfer will drain you wallet fast
* generally the interface seems slow which is a bit annoying (my previous Nokia mobile phone was slow too, so I guess that’s the Nokia way), and most of the applications which comes bundled with the phone seems to be crippled is some way, e.g. the office applications (word processor, spread sheet, presenter) only allows simple editing but can be upgraded to “Premium with editing” for only SEK 205,03 . The Adobe Reader LE (for PDF files) that comes with the phone in ver. 1.5 is upgradeable to “ver. 2.5 full version” for only SEK 100 (don’t ask what a full version PDF reader does better than a crippled version. The crippled version seems to display all text…).
Untested or stuff I need to figure out..:
* SIP phone. Well, I did configure the phone to connect to Gizmo (www.gizmoproject.com) but I think I have some NAT issues with my setup (either the mobile or my rarely used SIP phone) because I could only get voice to work one way, so I won’t judge it this soon.
* battery life…. it’s hard to say due to heavy usage these first days… if you don’t use WLAN it’s not bad, but not impressive…
* The phone does have a media player which apparently supports video, but the two clips I’ve tested only played the audio track :-/ I need to figure out how to convert videos to a workable solution/codec…
[quote comment="43745"]I bought a Nokia E61i a week ago, but I can’t make up my mind whether i like it or not…[/quote]
Wow, thanks for the thorough review of the E61i! It’s just like you say — it’s hard to decide, but the E61i seems to be the only usable phone in its class at this moment.
It still looks like the E61i is the phone for me though, but I have to give it a week to find all the quirks and oddities. There are some interesting video reviews on Youtube:
http://youtube.com/results?search_query=e61i
Then there is of course the E90 which seems to be a very competent phone, but it’s so big! (and expensive)
[quote comment="43745"]the two clips I’ve tested only played the audio track[/quote]
I think you need to convert the videos to mpeg4 or 3gpp to be able to play them on the phone.
[quote comment="43819"]Then there is of course the E90 which seems to be a very competent phone, but it’s so big! (and expensive)[/quote]
The size and outer finish of the phone is absolutely alright! The E61i is slim and fairly light, but a bit wide at first, but you’ll get used to that really quick. The casing has a nice “quality feel” about it – just like you would expect from Nokia.
[quote comment="43822"]The size and outer finish of the phone is absolutely alright! The E61i is slim and fairly light, but a bit wide at first, but you’ll get used to that really quick. The casing has a nice “quality feel” about it – just like you would expect from Nokia.[/quote]
That sounds great. It looks like the E61i will be my new phone.
Just one question, is it possible to carry it around in a jeans pocket, or is it too wide?
[quote comment="43861"]Just one question, is it possible to carry it around in a jeans pocket, or is it too wide?[/quote]
It’s not problem. I got it in the front pocket of my jeans now.
The phone is smaller than most wallets which people carry in front pockets to avoid pickpockets.
It’s about the same width as those credit card casings you can by at gas stations, but like an inch longer and bit ticker.
[quote comment="43878"]It’s not problem. I got it in the front pocket of my jeans now.
The phone is smaller than most wallets which people carry in front pockets to avoid pickpockets.
It’s about the same width as those credit card casings you can by at gas stations, but like an inch longer and bit ticker.[/quote]
Thanks for all your input! An E61i has now been ordered, but it will probably take a while before I receive it, since they were all out everywhere.