Rambling on…

I’ve been using the Nokia E71 for about 7 months now. It took me a while to get used to the QWERTY keypad and its relatively small keys, but now that I’m used to it, I think it’s great. It’s equipped with a 369MHz ARM11 Freescale processor so it handles most Symbian apps with ease. Below are my favourites (in no particular order):

1. eBuddy
If you’ve used eBuddy’s unified messaging system for the web browser, you’ll know what it’s capable of. With this app, you get an all-in-one solution to your messaging needs. eBuddy connects to MSN, Yahoo, AIM, GoogleTalk, Facebook, ICQ and MySpace. Perfect for those who maintain more than 2 of these accounts. I prefer this to Fring, but you may want to try Fring out if you use Skype as well. Only drawback about eBuddy is that it doesn’t fully recognise the E71’s QWERTY keypad so if you press the function key to key in numerics, it will think that your ‘T’, is the ‘2′ on a regular 9-key phone, so, 4 presses on ‘T’ to get ‘2′. It doesn’t recognise long presses either.

2. Gmail
Sure, the E71 has native support for Gmail via IMAP, but I still prefer the mobile app from Google. The interface is similar to the web version and (to me anyway), it’s quicker than using an IMAP protocol.

3. Nokia Energy Profiler
Not long after I got my E71, I started having problems with the power consumption. The phone would typically last 5 days when I first got it. Suddenly, it could only last 2 days… and that was with very light usage. I sent it back to Nokia twice to get it checked out, but the technicians were saying that there wasn’t anything wrong with the phone. It turned out that one of the apps I installed had a process running in the background that kept the CPU more or less at 100%. Whenever the phone was sent for diagnostics, the technicians would do a hard reset and format, so obviously they were not seeing the same problem I was. The Energy Profiler was very useful in helping me pinpoint the problem by showing me that my E71 abnormal power usage.

4. JBakTaskMan
While the Energy Profiler helped with showing the power usage, JBak Task Manager helped with displaying all background processes and allowing me to terminate the offending process. Surprisingly, the Symbian OS has more background processes than you’d expect. Although I don’t have the power usage issue anymore, I keep both Energy Profiler and JBak Task Manager on just in case.

5. Autolock
Nokia’s keypad autolock is seriously useless. It only works when you’re on the homescreen and nowhere else. Installing Autolock allows me to lock the phone anywhere and anytime, even from within an active app. So, no butt-dialling from my phone.. er, butt.

6. Y Profile Scheduler
If you’re like me and you have a few profiles, ie: office, home, outdoor… then chances are, you’ll have used the wrong profile for the wrong situation before. Nothing’s worse than having your phone ring at max volume whilst in a meeting.  Y Profile Scheduler allows you to define a schedule for your profiles. So my ‘Office’ profile activates at 8am in the morning and by 6:30pm, the ‘general’ profile is activated. At 10:30pm, it automatically activates the ’sleep’ profile. Useful stuff!

7. Nokia Sports Tracker
I love this app, I like to think of it as something like the shadow mode in Gran Turismo. It’s most useful when used with a GPS equipped phone. It tracks your exercise routine (ie: walking, running, cycling, etc) by logging your coordinates and it also gives you real time information such as speed, altitude, distance covered and so on. After a routine, it stores the information. You can then define a map or path using that information. If you regularly use that path, then you can compare past performances against your current form. You can even share these paths with an online community using the standard .kmz format or see your path in more detail by importing it into Google Earth.