It has taken the major handset makers some time to respond to the success of Research in Motion's BlackBerry. Having tried to convince buyers that what they really want is a regular handset that can also send and receiver email, phone makers like Nokia have just had to accept that there is a demand for devices with big screens and keyboards. Announced last year, the E61 has finally begun shipping as Nokia's answer to the near-ubiquitous RIM email tool.
Above the screen sit the power key and the incoming email alert light, both symmetrically placed either side of the earpiece. The speaker grille is on the phone's left side, next to the volume control keys - alas, they're not Nokia's answer to the BlackBerry's jogdial - and a third key which activates the voice recorder.
The base of the handset is home to the infrared port - do people still use these? - and Nokia's Pop-Port connector. And that's it - the rest of the phone is entirely featureless. There's not even a camera on the back. Part of the back-panel slides off to expose the battery compartment, the SIM slot and the handset's memory card bay. The SIM slides in sideways and is held in place by the battery itself. The MiniSD card - there's a 64MB unit in the box - is hot swappable and could have been made accessible without having to remove the back-panel had the cover been sculpted with suitably sized hole. Presumably, Nokia believes E61 users aren't the kind to swap memory cards in and out on a frequent basis. Not that removing the back-panel is hard, and at least this way the card is kept safe from accidental removal and loss.
It's pretty clear which route Nokia's designers chose to take when deciding which technologies to implement on the E61. It basically chucked them all in. The end result is a phone with (deep breath) support for GSM 850/900/1800/1900, 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, Infrared, VoIP, Push To Talk, and Mini SD storage cards. On the software side, you can add to that list support for Symbian OS 9.1 compatible applications, Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents, as well as Zip files and PDF files via Adobe reader. The E61's screen can be sent out to compatible projectors via the E61's screen export package, making it a potential replacement for some ultraportable notebooks, depending on your usage patterns. Naturally as a competitor in the BlackBerry space, the E61 has full support for POP3, IMAP, SMTP and Microsoft Exchange Server email. In an odd, and decidedly non-corporate way, it also supports instant messaging clients from Yahoo and AOL, MP3 and AAC music playback and RealPlayer video support. Just don't let the IT department know about those features and you should be fine.
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