Nokia E61i

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Features
The E61i retains most of the celebrated features on the E61, and then a bit more. There's now also a 2-megapixel shooter on the rear (no front-facing camera, though) and some new applications on the smart phone. You may want to know that the E61i uses the smaller microSD cards instead of miniSD media on the E61, although you still have to remove the battery cover to get access to the slot.

Rather disappointing is the barebones feature set of the camera on the E61i. We can't help but feel that Nokia could have done better in this aspect. While there's Night mode and settings to adjust the white balance and color tone, there's no built-in LED light to act as a flash unit. Admittedly, the light output from an LED is poor in comparison to flash modules on standalone cameras. But this could have been helpful in providing some illumination for low-light situations. Image quality isn't stunning. In fact, our test shots bordered on just average even for daylight snaps, but it should suffice for those who simply want a snapshot from this mobile.

Like its predecessor, the E61i is chock-a-block with connectivity options. The quadband (850/900/1800/1900MHz) handset is also 3G-enabled (UMTS 2100MHz) and is capable of hooking up to Wi-Fi (802.11b/g) networks. It's just a pity it doesn't come with HSDPA considering that we're already seeing an increase in the number of phones and PDAs which support the faster data connection. Of course, there's also the usual Bluetooth, infrared, USB and Nokia's proprietary Pop-Port to connect via cable for some PC-to-phone synchronization with the PC Suite.

	Screenshot of WidSets 1 \| 2

While the hardware changes are not what one would call revolutionary, Nokia makes up for this by having several programs preinstalled on the E61i. One of those we like most is WidSets. If you're familiar with the desktop widgets on the Mac OS dashboard, think of WidSets as the mobile version. In a nutshell, WidSets is able to download byte-sized information from the Internet to the E61i. Of course, you'll need to be connected to the Internet for that to happen. But the strength of WidSets is really its ease of use, simplified user interface and ever-growing list of widgets available.

	Nokia Team Suite

Another program we find interesting, but don't use quite as frequently, is the Message Reader that reads out our text messages. English is the default language, though Nokia representatives we spoke to said support for other languages could be available in the near future. There's also Team Suite, which is like a souped-up version of Groups under Contacts. We can set up "teams" for mass text messages or holding conference calls.

Probably the most useful for business users are programs such as QuickOffice (for reading and editing Word, Excel and PowerPoint (read-only) documents), BlackBerry Connect and Mail-for-Exchange. The good news about all these additional programs is that they can be downloaded from the Nokia Web site. So if you're using the E61, you can still have these applications on your handheld.

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