Behold the E71

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.6.1 through PuTTY for s60v3 on my phone! Somewhat pointless, I know, but so cool nonetheless.

I did a lot of research before buying a new phone, and I have to admit I’m pretty darn happy with my newly purchased Nokia E71. First off, it runs Symbian 60v3 which Nokia just acquired and is pushing to open source. It can read email to me in a synthesized British voice, automagically parses contact names for voice dialing, has a front facing 1mp camera in addition to the 3.2mp camera on the back, and the GPS supports turn-by-turn navigation software by Garmin and TomTom. Nokia’s browser supports some Flash content through Flash Lite and the PDF reader’s only limitation is really the size of the screen. The phone is a pleasure to hold at 10mm thick with a sturdy metal body. Of course the Symbian OS is a whiz at multitasking so no problem IM’ing, writing email, editing excel spreadsheets, taking video and surfing all at once. I can use the same bluetooth modem tether that I used for my old w810i with a few minor modifications to the chatscript. More on that later.

It has its flaws. The keyboard is small and wrapping your hands around the phone, while tempting because of its size, will kill the reception. GPS through Nokia Maps takes anywhere from 30sec to 10min to acquire a lock but Google Maps’ aGPS support makes it bearable. Of course, AT&T’s 3g network woes are annoying but I’m hopeful it will improve with time. The headphone jack is 2.5mm so I need to get a converter to use my new SE530s with it.

The amount of software out there for Symbian is amazing. Unfortunately, not a lot of it is free, but I have managed to find just about everything I need. Python for S60 1.4.4 was just released, so I’m sure I’ll be finding lots more to play with in the coming weeks. So far I’ve installed:

• Google Maps
• Google Mail – necessary for searching across 4+ years of GMail archives
• CalSyncS60 – Google Calendar sync
• PuTTY – ’nuff said.
• ScummVM – Secret of Monkey Island on the Metro!
• SIC!FTP – a decent FTP client
• Slick- very nice IM client supporting Gtalk, AIM, Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, etc.
• Twibble – excellent Twitter client
• Qik – live video streaming from phone to web
• Fring – Skype IM/call support

The fact that Nokia insisted on proprietary connectors (yes, even the USB cable is non-standard…) is frustrating and until someone gets sshd/vsftpd running on the phone, transferring files wirelessly is limited to bluetooth or FTP from the phone to the computer. I’m going to try to patch puTTY s60 to support ssh-xfer which would make things even easier. More on that later too.

There’s still a lot of geeky things to be discovered with this thing. Apparently the phone supports full disk encryption (!). And if all goes as planned, I’ll make my next post with Scribe.