Adventures with thE E71, Part 1
My plan for this evening was to sit down and write a comprehensive review of my two-week trial with the Nokia E71 NAM handset, but upon emerging from the Beaner's bedroom, I discovered a pile of work awaiting me in my Inbox. It's now 10:28pm, and I'm not sure I'll be able to get to everything I wanted to talk about in one go. I'm going to give it 30 minutes, and then I'll post what I've got. If I'm not finished, I'll write more tomorrow. Here goes...
First things first: Since my regular phone is an iPhone, I didn't have a SIM card to use with the E71. WOM World said they could send me one with the phone, and Ms. Jen suggested that I could pick up a pay-as-you-go card from a T-Mobile store, but I did not end up making the trip to the T-Mobile store when no SIM card arrived with the phone. Thus it was no use to me as an actual phone, so I have no idea what the call quality is like.
The Nokia E71 (left) and my iPhone (right). They're of comparable size; both fit easily into my pocket.
I did, however, use the E71 in situations where I would normally use my iPhone—namely, for taking photos, sending e-mails, uploading photos to Flickr *by* e-mail, taking notes, and browsing the web. Well, I only browsed the web twice; once to see what this website looked like in the E71's browser, and once to Google something. The web browsing experience wasn't all that thrilling, though, so I found myself just using my iPhone without even considering that the E71 was also in my pocket.
I wish I'd taken this with my Canon 870; it does better in low light than my iPhone (incidentally, so does the E71, but it could not be both camera and subject). In any case, this is the main page of avocado8 on the E71. As you can see, the two-column layout has been jettisoned, I assume for easier reading.
On November 7 I took the E71 (and the iPhone, since I wanted to listen to podcasts) on my morning walk. It was a blustery, gray morning with occasional light drizzle—not ideal circumstances for testing a cameraphone, but real circumstances. I figured that the E71 might even do better than the iPhone under these conditions, since it has a flash (or a light that comes on when you're taking a photo, anyway). Of course, as with any built-in flash, it doesn't do much outdoors if the subject of the photo is more than a few feet away.
I started with a fall foliage shot, followed by a standard morning walk self-portrait.
When I reached the Schuylkill Banks trail, I took my iconic bridge shot (the thumbnail versions were taken with my Vivitar IC101 panoramic):
Next, I did a side-by-side comparison: I held the E71 in my left hand, and the iPhone in my right, and I took a photo with each.
E71 (left/top), iPhone (right/bottom)
Neither of the photos have been edited. If you view them both large (E71, iPhone), you can see which details get lost. You may also notice what I did, right away: That the iPhone naturally took the tree in vertical format, while the E71 went with horizontal. It never occurred to me to tilt the E71, as I recall.
Annnnnnd.... that's where I'll have to leave this for the night, as I completely blew through my 30 minute limit and am now in danger of missing the midnight deadline for posting (for NaBloPoMo purposes). To be continued!