I, too, have taken a similar route, to the E71. I love my Palm T3, but couldn’t commit to a smartphone, for the longest time. My experience with the iPAQ 210 convinced me that WinMo was not the way to go, although I like how completely WinMo’s apps sync with Office (particularly with Outlook). Nokia’s S60 phones looked like the way to go, what with decent support for the “mission critical” phone functions, plus access to a wealth of innovative native and third party applications.

For me, the biggest drawbacks have been the poor support S60 gives to categories – my GTD devotion relies upon categories and there are, at best, only workarounds to provide similar functionality on the E71.

I was suprised at how poorly Nokia’s native email application functioned. Within a few weeks of purchase, my phone refused to open emails and SMS received in the messaging app. I had to purchase ProfiMail, to handle my email, but was eventually able to use Nokia’s Conversation app to give me the threaded text messaging support I was seeking.

Nokia’s PC Suite has been giving me fits – this last week, it stopped recognizing the presence of the memory card, in the phone. Transferring files between my PC and phone just got a lot harder. And Nokia’s lousy customer service doesn’t help.

Despite all these complaints, the E71 is a fast phone and it handles the AT&T 3G network here in the U.S. real nice. For me, it’s the closest thing to the perfect smartphone, combining phone and pocketable computing capabilities in an undeniably sleek package.

I’ll be very interested to read of your experiences, as you dive more deeply into this device.

Thanks for your thoughts, Mark. So far, I am still trying to get over the learning curve with the E71. It is touch going from Windows Mobile to Symbian because it is similar but different. Not like the iphone which was not even close to the same.

Anyway, one thing I have really been noticing is how the origins of each operating system play into the emphasis and direction of each.

Windows Mobile has roots in being a PIM/PDA and is probably still the most powerful pocket computer out there.

iPhone has its roots in entertainment/iPod

Symbian has its roots in the phone aspect.

To me, the E71 still feels very much like an extremely elaborate feature phone. It can still do a lot of stuff, but in the end it still has a much stronger emphasis on the phone than on the computer. We’ll see if that opinion changes as I get more involved with it.

Doug