The Nokia E61i smartphone is for individuals who want a large screen and alphabetic keypad, but still want a phone, not a PDA or a Web Tablet device. With a two-megapixel camera and features geared for email access, the Nokia E61i is a useful phone for anyone who needs a mobile device for browsing the Internet and for viewing photos, videos, or TV. Although the device is wider than your average phone, it is slim so it can easily slip into a shirt pocket or into a purse

The E61i impresses with its sleek, thin, aluminum and black plastic enclosure. At 117 by 70 by 13.9 mm , the phone's thinness is partially offset by its width. Sure, it's a bit ungainly to hold to your ear, though not nearly as bad as the brick-like i-mate JAQ. It weighs 150 g (5.3 ounces), putting it in the middle zone between svelte 3.5-ounce BlackJacks and fat 6.4-ounce Treos.

TFT, 240х320, 16.7 million colors

The Nokia E61i has an extremely large 16M color TFT display with a QVGA (320x240 pixels) resolution – it measures a good 2.8 inches in diagonal which is close to PocketPC displays.

ust as those, it looks pretty vulnerable in the beginning due to the large exposed surface. When it comes to performance under bright sunlight… Let’s just say that in this respect Nokia have been doing some really great work lately – their displays are among the best ones we’ve seen.

The most obvious upgrade of the Nokia E61i over the previous E61 version is without a doubt the added 2 megapixel camera. The camera is a sensitive feature in work environments where information protection is enforced by all means necessary – meaning that employees are not allowed to have cameraphones. But yet Nokia realizes the need for a messenger with a camera – much like Blackberry have their Pearl handset.

The maximum available resolution is 1600 x 1200 pixels. The camera doesn’t have any complex settings, which is understandable – E61i is not a dedicated cameraphone. The available settings include: night mode, sequence, self-release, white balance, and color effects. Pictures are stored in JPEG format and carry EXIF information.

As far as quality is concerned we find that 2 megapixel camera on an average level, but still – it does a good job. The picture quality is pretty much the same as the one of the Nokia E70 – they seem to have identical hardware and processing algorithm. Somewhat confusingly, the shutter sound goes off a second or something before the actual capturing of the picture so you really have to keep the handset still even after you’ve heard the sound in order to take a picture of your intended subject.

Standard battery, Li-Po 1500 mAh (BP-4L)
Stand-by Up to 400 h
Talk time Up to 9 h

The Music Player of the Nokia E61i is nice. It has an equalizer and supports Playlists. It’s not on par with the players of some dedicated music phones but it does its job satisfactory. The supported file formats are MP3, AAC, m4a, eAAC+ and WMA. Of course, the player can run in the background. The controls of the player are very intuitive. It also manages M3U playlist format seamlessly and can even handle the file automatically if it is placed in the same directory as the music files. A good advice to the users is to use USB 2.0 card readers for transferring music files to the memory card as this way is much faster than the Nokia Pop-port transfers.

The phone also has a Real Player and a Flash player preinstalled. The video can be watched in full screen if you press the 2 key. As all other E-series devices it has no FM radio tuner.

- 60 MB shared memory
- 64 MB SDRAM memory
- ARM 9 220 MHz processor

Available memory on the E61i is about 60MB, and you can add another 2GB via a microSD card slot, which is unfortunately located inside the battery compartment (but at least not under the battery).

The E61i, more than other members of the Eseries family, is a messaging device. To people on the move that means email support. The standard Messaging app in S60 is well known, so I won't dwell on it here, though I will remind you that it can be set to pull in email automatically, every 30 minutes or so, kind of a poor man's 'push' email. But the E61i (and upcoming E90 and E65, etc.) are fully compatible with real push email systems, an area we haven't covered much before, so this is a good opportunity to see how well it works.

When it comes to connectivity, Nokia E61i has pretty much got it covered on all sides. You name it: GPRS, EDGE, Wi-Fi, UMTS, USB, Bluetooth and Infrared. Nokia E61i works with Bluetooth Specification 1.2 and A2DP is not among the supported profiles which makes impossible the use of stereo Bluetooth headset with the phone. But then again, E61i is a business oriented smartphone right form the get go. The supported Bluetooth profiles are Dial-Up Networking, File Transfer Service and Object Push Service.

USB 2.0 is supported with the USB cable supplied in the retail box. When connected to a PC, one of three modes can be chosen for the handset: “Mass storage” - memory card is available as a removable USB drive, no drivers are required; "PC Suite" - standard mode; "Picture Bridge" - direct access to printer, which supports PictBridge.

Fast data transfers can be achieved via GPRS, EDGE or 3G UMTS. You can also try the Wi-Fi connectivity, in which case you have to be near a Wi-Fi hotspot. And while you are at it, feel free to use the available Internet telephony.

The Nokia E61i has the latest support for SIP-based services. You can set Internet calling (VoIP) as the default calling method when a SIP service is available which makes internet calls that much easier.

This E61i comes with a built-in WLAN scanner – something we’ve missed in previous Nokia WLAN-enabled smartphones. Now such an application along with an Active standby screen plug-in is available as an official download for all previous models.

Rich connectivity options - UMTS, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB, Infrared
Outstanding battery life
2 megapixel camera
Messenger form factor with a full QWERTY keyboard
Really large 2.8” TFT display
Solid, metallic body
Symbian OS 9.1 S60 3rd Edition UI
microSD memory card slot