Nokia E71 Multimedia pretensions

Multimedia on 'Enterprise'-aimed S60 devices has always lagged a little behind the cutting edge and the E71 is no exception. But, to cut it some slack, it's a lot better than on the clunky old E61i. Media handling is slightly crippled by the use of USB 1.1, as on most other current S60 devices, although slow file transfers won't be a huge issue for many typical Eseries users, who arguably tend not to swap their music and video collections around as often as, say, someone with an N95.

Video playback now includes H.264 support, so most MP4 videos will play without problem. I did notice some jerkiness occasionally (there are no fancy 3D graphcis chips to help out here, as on the N95, for example) and suspect that there's still some fine tuning to do under the hood for future firmwares. Video on the E71 is still watchable though. Likewise music playback is now acceptable without seriously encroaching on the audio quality found in the likes of the N78, the N95 or standalone digital music players. The inclusion of a proper Equaliser was useful and I liked keeping 'Bass booster' on in order to hear bass frequencies better. In summary, media playback is fine for occasional use but you probably wouldn't choose the device for these abilities.

The E71 fares well when it comes to multimedia creation, though I have to admit to being a little disappointed by the camera - I'd been hoping for the same unit that featured in the E90. Instead, we get a small lensed 3.2mp camera (to bang the gong yet again - it's not all about how many megapixels a camera has) with comparatively cheap optics and sensor. You can see in the examples here (click to open full-size) that in bright conditions contrast is handled relatively poorly. Indoors, the images are digitally noisy, even with the LED flash, as you'd expect from such a small lens. No worse than in the cameras in many other smartphones, but worse than the E90's camera and a lot worse than that in the likes of the N95.

On the plus side, focussing is down to an incredible 4cm - great for nature shots! Focussing itself is handled in semi-automatic fashion and I'm somewhat impressed by how much flexibility this gives the user. Previously a smartphone user had to choose between a focussing camera for which you had to wait a second or so for focussing and for which you really needed a static subject, and a non-focussing camera that was great for instant shots (i.e. it didn't need to wait and focus) but for which anything close was blurry. With the E71, you can press the D-Pad to take an instant shot or press the 't' key (beneath the D-Pad) to focus if needed, after which you then press the D-Pad to snap, etc. I thought I'd hate this solution but in fact it's proven very flexible - you really do get the best of both worlds. If only the camera optics had been better, the E71 could have been a real contender in terms of day to day photography.

For video recording, capture is at the new 'phone' standard of QVGA at 15 frames per second (i.e. YouTube-friendly), although the optics are pretty good for this sort of work and the captured soundtrack is of much higher quality than similar video-recording phones and smartphones. Again though, video recording seems a little week compared to the E90 (let alone the Nseries super-multimedia-phones).