Nokia’s e61 smartphone

I got a Nokia e61 a few days ago and It’s almost perfect. I need 24/7 access to email, web and SSH because of my work, and up until now I was carrying around a Sony Ericsson K750i and a Palm T|X. I was thinking of buying a Palm Treo 650, but then this came out. It’s lighter and slimmer than a Treo, and the battery life is pretty good.

I’ve got a few gripes though…. The display is big @ 320×240, but the signal and battery strength indicators are so small as to be useless. There is also no way of knowing what method you’re connected with. It would be nice to know if I was connected by wi-fi (free) or 3G (not) before I start downloading the latest podcasts.

The e-mail client is far from perfect. My preferred method of connecting is IMAP. That way I can access all my mail folders and changes get synchronised with those on my PC and webmail. IMAP is pants on this device. Connecting is very slow, and it often hangs when disconnecting from the server.

The other problem with e-mail is the “access point groups”. Because this thing will connect using 802.11g, UMTS, or GPRS, you can define groups with automatic failover. That way you can always have it try the fastest or cheapest and try the next one down the line if it doesn’t work. Unfortunately the e-mail client has a habit of forgetting what group is selected and changing the setting to the currently active access method. It’s happened several times that I’ve been out and about all day on UMTS, and it wouldn’t switch back to wi-fi when I got back to the office