So I bought the Nokia E61 with great hopes that the device with BBconnect would finally allow me to return back to the Symbian OS and still retain my BB BIS services. The phone has a very sexy design and feel much better build quality than the 8700. It feels and looks like an apple aluminum iphone would be like. The OS is nice and the browser is amazing, but the BBconnect does not allow proper integration with the RIM network.

#1 - No support for PIN messaging, this is a total deal breaker for me. I NEED PIN support to comunicate with collegues who have BBs. The lack of the this feature alone is enough for me to ditch the E61.

#2 - Since I use BIS 2.0 with tmobo, I need to have active server side deletion option. The e61 does not have a pop up message deletion dialog box where you can select delete on handheld, or handheld & mailbox. You can only set a single global general parameter that will apply to all future deletions, this is a major techmology step backwards.

#3 - Overall OS speed and performance. This machine feels much slower than the 8700 how much of this is due to hardware or a heavy/slow/brand new OS rev??? I am not sure. Either way it is too slow in general use when compared to the 8700. The software design and UI of s60 is just okay, the menus are very layered which makes things hard to find and they take a lot of time to get to. The RIM/BB OS is so simple, elegent, functional, and powerful....it just lacks some of the 3rd party apps bells and whistles of the other big OS players.


Stay tuned for more if a new rev of the BBconnect software is released.