Its a Nokia E61i.
The Nokia E Series smartphones are currently the most advanced in the market. Some may say iPhone but there is no more than great usability and fancy-ness on it.
These are a few characteristics I like in E61i:
- QWERTY keyboard. I’m tired of loosing stylus pens and even use them to point things.
- WiFi with power save features. This is unique and as far as I know only Nokia and now the iPhone have it. E61i can also connect to Cisco WiFi networks with LEAP authentication, as used by my company. At work, at home and everywhere it finds a WiFi network I stay connected all the time with a sort of smart roaming, without running out of batteries.
- A wide screen and great web features as integrated feed reader and full XHTML browser based on KDE’s Konqueror that perfectly render very well all pages I need.
- Integrated Java support so I can install a practical mobile Google Maps application amongst others.
- Media features as MP3, MPEG-4’s AAC, MPEG-4 video (low profile DivX/Xvid) and MP4 container support.
- 2 megapixel camera for pictures and video.
- Can syncronize PIM data with anything that supports the SyncML Open Standard, for example the ScheduleWorld.com service.
- Has Text To Speech capabilities, so everytime somebody calls me, the phone actually speaks his or her name as it is written in the contacts database. There are options to install and use different voices and language accents.
- Has voice recognition capabilities, so I can press a button in the wireless bluetooth phones to make the phone as for a name, I speak it and it recognizes by how it is written in the contacts database. I did not have to record each contact’s name as previous phone models. Nokia E61i actually recognizes what I speak.
- And, to keep me hacking, the most important: integrated VoIP support through the SIP standard.
This last point deserves an explanation. To use VoIP you usually have to install a softphone in your computer and be close to it to make calls. Well, this phone kind of has a standards compliant softphone already installed in the OS. Together with great WiFi support, I can carry my work extension and other SIP accounts with me all the time, to make cheap international calls and also receive free calls.
This is all very geeky and I love it.
In further articles I’ll explain how to configure advanced features I’ve been using in my new Nokia E61i, a very portable computer.