E55 v/s E71: How Much Of An Upgrade Is The E55 To The E71?

The venerable E71 has been the inspiration behind Nokia upcoming messaging device, the E55 which also holds the honor of being the slimmest smartphone from the Finnish manufacturer. It packs in quite a few never seen before goodies, like N-Gage and FP2 as far as the Eseries goes, but the question on my mind is that despite being more of a successor to the E51, does it have the capability of replacing my trusty E71.

As a blogger I often have the good fortune of playing with a lot of new devices and at times having in a possession quite a few of them at one time. I make it a point to use a smartphone myself for at least two weeks before reviewing it, however I have found myself coming back to the E71 again and again after the said period is over.

But when I see the E55, I see immense potential. Potential to become my next primary device, a device that finally manages to dethrone the E71. The 5800 came close, but not close enough and for the purposes of this post, I shall not consider the N97. So lets how the E71 matches up to the next generation Eseries.

So there you have it, the E71 is getting trumped on a lot of things. FP2 brings OTA Firmware updates, higher speed USB transfers, better browser download capabilities, access point prioritization amongst the eye candy. The E55 owing to the 3.5mm jack and WMA/WMV support is a better audio and video device. It also has better video capture, a faster CPU and the biggest of them all N-Gage. Then there is another Nseries exclusive, the on board video editor. Nokia has also added a dedicated camera key and accelerometer support, not to mention the beautiful brushed aluminum that takes away the fingerprint magnet tag. The size is definitely going to work for it and it is also 32 grams lighter than the E71. That’s a long list.

The aspects that could get people to hold on are the keypad and perhaps for some, the screen. The obvious argument being why give up full QWERTY? The answer is in the above paragraph, plus I am sure a few weeks of getting used to the new keypad will do the trick. Next is the matter of the screen, yes its the same size but the orientation makes a huge difference in readability and even otherwise. I find reading on the E71′s screen easier than say on the 2.6″ of the N95 just because of this simple thing.

The E55 thus comes up drubbing the E71 in almost all departments, so will it replace the E71? I don’t know. The reason I say that is because I am yet to play with one and also experience how fast (or slow) it is. The E71 is like greased lightning and so far no FP2 device I have played with has managed to match upto it (N78, N96 & N85 included). If it can do that, who knows… I fancy the white one. What do you think?