After a long consideration about whether getting a SonyEricsson M600i or a Nokia E61, I’ve made up my mind. Got myself a E61 over M600i for 3 main factors, Wifi, EDGE support and its price.

Outlook/Appearance
It is so far the widest phone i’ve ever owned. Measuring at 6.9cm in width.. goosh. Although it is wide, but it’s sleek and slim! It’s just 1.4cm thick. The whole phone housing is made by magnesium alloy, heard me correct.. yes it’s magnesium alloy, the same material used in Motorola V3. You feel sturdy and solid when you holding it.

the screen is measured at 2.8inch!!! with a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels. the screen is amazingly sharp, bright and wide. I’ve applied a sheet of screen protector belongs to the O2 mini’s, which fits perfectly.. all edges covered. The QWERTY thumbboard is nicely layout, when the phone is in standby mode, the highlighted numeric keys will be activated, meaning you just press the key to get the numbers without pressing the ‘shift key’, functioning just like normal mobile phone.

New S60 Platform at a glance
12 icons are seen in one screen, compare to N70 which is only 9 icons at a time. The resolution is very fine, my camera was not able to capture its finest shot, in real life you can’t even see the pixels, it’s just fine. This little thing is able to perform multitasking, same as N70.. by holding the Application button for 2 secs,a small list will pop up at the top left of the screen, allow you to switch from one application to another.

Web Browser
Based on Webcore technology, that’s found in Apple’s Safari web browser. This is the best part that impressed me alot. I have used O2 XDA2, O2 Mini, 9300 and P910i previously, none of these satisfied me when come to web browsing. All of them using a cut-down version of web browser that was optimized to render very light HTML contents. But the one found in E61 is just superb! It uses better rendering engine to render HTML tags (DHTML/XHTML/CSS and etc) and it supports Macromedia Flash content, no shit and no joke!! What you see at desktop is possible in this little smartphone!

it’s very snappy when browsing internet web pages (via 3G or Wifi), as fast as like using a laptop browsing the website. no kidding, i’m impressed with this, bear in mind it just running on a 220Mzh processor. The joystick acts as a mouse pointer, which allows you to do top-bottom, left-right scrolling. A virtual page layer will be displayed if you do a long scroll, indicating the area of that particular web page you are focusing.

Better Message Management
SMS/MMS is similar as N70, but Email handling is better now. Incoming emails are listed in a much more nicer layout, showing the sender’s email, subject and date. When writing email, you can attach file to it, in fact you can edit the attached file (if the format is supported la.. of course). Setting mailbox like hotmail, gmail, AOL and other well known free email providers are just as simple as ‘eating beancurd’, the Wizard will guide you throughout the whole account creating process. Basically, you just need to select which provider to go, your email address, username and password and voila… done!

You also can configure the phone to prompt you for the connection choices whenever there is a need for internet connection.

Nokia Music Player
A brand new music player for S60 platform (same as those newly launched N-series), and it supports Equalizer this time. I’m quite satisfied with the speaker’s quality of E61, it’s just sound sweet, loud and clear. Seems like nokia is enhancing the ‘driver’ to produce better sound output now. The sound produced is better than my N70, i would say very good improvement. Musics playing session is loud, solid and clearer now. (very loud… trust me.. very loud!)

Mobile Office
E61 bundled with Office application package, which allow you to view and edit office documents on the go. Presentation(microsoft powerpoint) is added allow you to edit and view presentation file too. However, features have been cut down to suit the platform.

Battery Life
Battery life is just awesome! I’ve on it for 2 days now, with minimal phone calls made and received (4-6 calls per day) and 10-20 SMS per day, 30 minutes WIFI’ing (download email/web browsing). Now my E61 still standing strong at full battery bars!! yes no joke, still at full bars!! I thought my P910i was great (averagely lasting for 3 days) but this one even better!! Thanks Nokia for putting a 1500Mah cell in, this is just lovely. I reckno it would last me more than 3 days.

Conclusion
this is a great replacement for my P910i (which used to be my great daily workforce…). I thought I would stick to Symbian UIQ after with P910i, but I was wrong, the improvement on S60 (SymbianOS also…) is stunning. Great UI implemented, useful features added and much more. I have no regret choosing E61 over M600i (which going to be out soon in Malaysian market), and I’m pretty sure with it. There are still tonne of features need some time for me to explore.. will update the exploration from time to time. In brief, all these made me go for E61:

• Wifi support
• EDGE support
• Quad bands
• Magnesium Alloy Body-solid and no creaky sound
• Loud and Clear Speaker (can’t really sure now as I do not have M600i to compare with)
• lastly, the price is well worth it!!

Last word
If you are looking a full multimedia device, this will be your best buck to spend with… err.. minus the camera. okay? It’s snappy, solidly built and features packed. And it would be even better, if Nokia bundled with a cradle stand and a carrying pouch, that would be something delightful.

Size Comparison (with N70 and 6230)

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