More from Pandora’s box

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: As a kid I had my share of exposure to comic-book super heroes, like Superman, Phantom, Garth, Mandrake the Magician, Batman to name a few. Some of them wore masks and some wore their shorts over their tight fitting costumes. But the most elegantly dressed was Mandrake the Magician — in black tuxedo, and a flowing cloak, waxed moustaches and a black silk hat.

Nokia’s E71 reminded me of the Mandrake the Magician, suave, stylish, sleek! Like dressed in a tuxedo with a Pandora’s box of tricks (features).

If there is an award for good looks, this Nokia E71 will win hands down. Chiselled out of steel and alloys, it has a very slim footprint (112mm X 57mm X 10mm) and weighs just about 126 grams.

Well-contoured shiny steel front of the phone is divided in two equal portions. The top portion is a very bright 2.36” QVGA display screen (320 X 240 pixels and 16 million colours). The lower portion has a full QWERTY keypad.

The display screen is not very big (there are many phones with bigger screens in this category) but I found it to be very sharp and easily legible even in bright daylight. The colour rendition and contrast while watching multimedia were very pleasing to the eyes despite the rather small size.

The keypad is a bit pedestrian, unimaginative and not very comfortable to use till you really get used to it. But the touch pressure is just right and almost compensates for the flaws in the keypad design. A cool feature on the function keys that I like is the flashing white light around the middle ‘big key’ notifying that you have a missed event, and it will continue to glow till you clear that event or the preset time expires. Four shortcut keys with icons ‘Home’ ‘Calendar’ ‘Contacts’ and Email’ for quick recall is another bright idea.

Most of the rear panel is taken by the solid steel back cover except for a small raised rectangle that houses the main auto-focus lens and flash of the 3.2 mega pixel camera.

The back cover for some strange reasons had been given a dotted grid pattern and very glossy, almost mirror like finish, making it a magnet for finger-prints and smudges.