A New E71

My wife would like to combine the functionality of her current three device into one. Her brother would recontract his Singtel mobile contract so this was just nice. He would buy the phone as a gift.

But it turns out that here requirement is actually high even on surface the high end requirements (Wifi, GPS) are not there.

1) Nokia 6280 Phone for voice/sms, MP3, FM radio. This was bought in the Christmas time of year 2006 as a gift. It is a good phone but the built-in dictionary is not good enough for medical study.

2) HP Jornada 545 (my old Pocket PC 2002 PDA bought in 2002) for dictionary function (MDICT and medical dictionary). It is old and heavy.

3) BESTA electronics dictionary with keyboard and voice. It is easy to use but

I was looking at Windows Mobile platform initialy since MDICT works. FM and Keyboard combination seems to be the problem. There are quite some Windows Mobile Professional (Standard is not considered as I think Windows Mobile is designed more with a touch screen in mind) with keyboard but most of them do not have FM radio. The only one selling in Singtel is HTC Touch Pro which costs SGD988 for recontract without trade-in (SGD888 for new line). She would not give up the FM requirement. If she gives up the requirement for the keyboard, there are some more choices like LG KS20 (SGD268 for recontract), some MWG (O2 XDA) device and some HTC devices. However after trying out a lower-end Asus P320 Windows Mobile 6.1 Phone, she did not feel like the keyboard requirement could be dropped.

The I started to look at Symbian OS platform. LG KT610 has keyboard and is cheap, unfortunately it does not have FM. In the end, we bought a Nokia E71 which has a lot of functionality (Wifi seems to be of good use, GPS is no use now). Most of the phones used at home are from Nokia and the quality of Nokia is really top notch based on our experiences.

Initially my wife did not quite like the outlooks. But now she thinks the phone is great.