The Holy Grail

Knights had their swords, horses and armour. The business person (and sometimes, the connected student) only has his mobile phone, more often than not while on the road. Hence, it makes perfect sense to invest in a great mobile phone which can do much more than merely make calls.

I have used a lot of smart/PDA Phones, but the holy grail has always been finding one with the right size, weight, functionality and features, all in one package. And now, dear reader, I think I’ve found it. But first, some history.

My O2 XDA IIs was too clunky, but the screen was incredible.

The Nokia 9300 lacked WIFI (although the 9300i incorporates that), a touchscreen and looked really, very old (almost enough to qualify as retro).

The O2 Atom doesn’t have a Qwerty keyboard

Most phones from Dopod, O2, HP, Nokia (Communicator series) and Sony (the P9xx series) are either too thick or they lack a feature I need desperately (mostly, WIFI or a QWERTY keyboard get the axe).

Introducing the Champion:

The Nokia E61 (click for review) has it all. WIFI, check. Thinness? Comparable to the RAZR. Screen? brighter than most. QWERTY? fully. Blackberry? Yes.

From Wikipedia:

Manufacturer	Nokia
Type	smartphone
Connectivity	WWAN quad-band GSM, UMTS/EDGE/GPRS/HSCSD/CSDWLAN Wi-Fi 54 Mb/s 802.11gPAN Bluetooth 1.2 (723.1 kb/s); infrared and full-speed USB
Retail Availability	from 2006
Operating System	S60 platform third edition on Symbian OS
Media	MP3/AAC
Input	46 keys QWERTY thumb keyboard, five-way joystick
Power	1,500mAh lithium-polymer battery, 5.7V 800mA power supply
Memory	64MB miniSD card
Display	Landscape QVGA 320 × 240 LCD screen 24 bits (16 million) colors

Of course, there is always a trade off. Nokia dumped the camera, but really, a good compromise to keep the profile so thin and yet feature rich. I must also commend the excellent build quality. Doesn’t come with a dock though And finally, a half-baked, over-hyped pretender:

The RAZR was great, a true engineering and design marvel. The Moto Q doesn’t cut it for me. No WIFI, bad bluetooth implementation, slow roll-out and way too much hype. In my opinion, Motorola dropped by the ball by promising too much (albeit, implicitly) and delivering too little, too late. Goes to show that the tenets of old business still matter in new business.

I am generally discussing the GSM versions of these phones.