Why I Still Love the Nokia E71
From When a Smartphone Is Too Much for Travel – NYTimes.com:
With the rise of the iPhone and the Blackberry, it’s hard to imagine hitting the road without a phone that can’t download music, serve up maps or send and receive e-mail. But sometimes a body just needs to make a few calls from the road. Sometimes a body needs a featureless phone.
Or you can use an older Symbian device like the Nokia E71 and get the best of both worlds–the ability to make calls, long battery life and some Smartphone niceties like maps and social networking.
Some of the annoyances of Symbian phones of this vintage, namely the incessant prompts to connect, are actually a benefit. When I’m traveling and using one of my roaming SIMs (e.g. Truphone, Maxroam), I can certainly use data, but even at their lower rates, I don’t want to use very much data. Just enough to, say, update my Twitter feed.
Using Opera Mini on a late-model Symbian device like the Nokia E71, which compresses web pages by up to 90% by routing requests through Opera’s servers, you can do that and more without breaking the bank.
