I just got the Nokia E61i, which has a Qwerty keyboard and Wifi.

It does things okay but some things are really annoying.

1. From main menu, you can select a Wifi connection. But the browser and the mail program will prompt you each time to pick a Wifi connection.

Your choices are, "Always Ask" or "User-Defined." So I can user-define my home network but if I go out and find a public hotspot (there are a lot of Wifi networks, most of them locked but a lot open), I will have to change the settings again from user-defined to always ask.

And that means going through a lot of menus.

That is despite selecting the Wifi connection from the main OS shell.

2. Mail program won't use SSL connections for outgoing mail. At first I couldn't figure it out because I was using the exact same settings as in my PowerBook. But there were no error messages of any kind, the outgoing messages would just sit in a queue (only set up a couple of POP accounts, including a Gmail account).

So I turned off SSL and it just worked.


3. Browsing is cumbersome. You just scroll around and there is no pointer, it just highlights links on a page and you hold up, down, left or right to scroll around. It's usable but compared to those commercials of scrolling around smoothly, zooming in and out of certain pics. or sections, the Nokia just feels like using Lynx, a text based HTML browser.


4. Some inconsistency in how apps. use connections. For instance, the workaround I described for setting connections for mail and browsing work. But Google Maps Mobile for E61 doesn't have a workaround when you're trying to use a "hidden WLAN," or a Wifi network which is not broadcasting SSID for security reasons.

Only way it works is to broadcast the SSID.



Of course commercials and online demos don't tell you everything but iPhone sure looks less aggravating. Of course, the pricing and contract requirements put me off and I will wait to see what they do in the future.