I tried one of the latest and best of Nokia’s new crop of phones today.  I haven’t had a Nokia for about 5 years now and whilst I have always had a high regard for them, they just haven’t been the right phone for me.

The E71 is a very tempting package, slim, light weight, metal case, very pretty and packed with all sorts of goodies.  It has a built in GPS, a proper QWERTY keyboard, long battery life, push email and should be a great phone for many business folks.  There are loads of very detailed and very good reviews out there, so I won’t go through it all feature by feature.

I really wanted to to love it for so many reasons, but it’s one little flaw was a total deal breaker.  It doesn’t hold the RF signal well enough, which means that here on the edge of the reception zone, it is all but unusable, except as an executive paper weight.  I think that it is odd that the one key function of a phone, the ability to make and receive calls, seems to be ranked so low down the list of ‘features’.

Nice phone , but no cigar.