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.

Agreed. While I absolutely *love* my E61 as it does everthing I need it to, the BB is still the best messaging device around. I miss the scrollwheel. I miss the sensible shortcuts and UI philosophy. I still have my 7520, but since my goal was to consolidate, I'll be sticking with the E61 as my main comm device.

I would've gone with the 8700 if I could use it as a modem for my Mac, but still no support from RIM or a 3rd party for that yet. :(

True I have not been able to get the 8700 to act as a modem under OS X. Tell me what did you do to get the E61 to work with your mac, what "number" did you use to dial out in the set-up for the E61?

Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (SymbianOS/9.1; U; en-us) AppleWebKit/413 (KHTML, like Gecko) Safari/413)

Also what network carrier are you using with your E61

I went to Ross Barkman's home page. If you google "Ross Barkman" it will be the first result returned. I downloaded the following phone scripts:

"Scripts for Nokia 3G (EDGE/UMTS) phones (17kB)"

The telephone number is: internet2.voicestream.com

The README that comes with the phone scripts has good instructions on how to get everything set up, but if you have any questions I'd be glad to help.

Sorry I couldn't post the URLs, I don't have enough posts to do so. Ugh.

I'm using t-mobile as my carrier.

I was able to get the bluetooth to teather internet to my macbook, worked like a charm. iSync seems to work very well this phone. Nokia and Apple have been in collusion for quite a while with bluetooth technology and it shows. The bluetooth expereince was much better than my experiences with the Symbian UIQ 2.1 OS on my SE P900, the bluetooth stack in that device was a total mess. The E61 has a resonable BT stack and seem to work well. I will test the bluetooth with my car and see how it handles it, my 8700's BT stack works great with my car, downloads the phone book, does caller ID on my dashboard etc we will see how the e61 performs.

I have only used the phone with a SIM card for about 12 hours, that was all the evaulation time that was needed to determine that BBconnect is not adequate. In fact it is so bad that I can not really give it any primetime SIM card time, I can not afford to be away from the BB backbone. I going to buy a prepaid SIM card and carry both devices for a while and see how much better it really is. The browser is just amazing, it is a mobile app based on a variant of KDEkonqueror/Safari/KHTML engine (another collusion with apple, would not surprise me at all if apple entered the mobile device marketplace, perhapse even working with nokia??) and it is pretty sick and best of all it is not an MSbrowser. I have been using the device in WiFi mode connect to my 802.11 network and the wifi in the device is rock solid, works perfectly. The radios in the device are pretty spectacular and seem to work very well for me. Not bad for an early OS but still no match for the current RIM 4.10.xxx handheld OS. GoogleMapsMobile works great on the phone, worldmate does a decent job with the weather, the mobile office apps are sick (allows me to read and edit word, excel, and powerpoint docs), and most importantly the adobe acrobat reader. The lack of decent PDF support with RIM's current OS is getting on my last nerve, they needed to address this issue yesterday.

So until a new BBconnect app comes out I am going to have to stick with the 8700g as my primary device. it is REALLY hard to do that because the new E61 makes me want to pick it up touch it and play with it, it is a very nice piece of industrial design and packs a massive amount of features include (850, 900, 1800, and 1900 GSM/EGPRS radios, UMTS 2100 radio, bluetooth radio, and a 802.11 radio), would be real interesting using this device on a UTMS cellular network too bad the inital US UTMS roll out looks to be in the 1900 band. Hopefully RIM/Nokia will clean up the BBconnect application and make this a really killer phone.

I have an E61 on order so I have been reading this all with interest.

My last handheld was an 8700r so I should be able to give a good comparison.

I do not really need to use BBconnect as I was using BWC with a copy of all my e-mail sent there. So I am going to try Nokia Intellisync in place of BWC and see how it goes.

Athough I am still waiting for the handheld, I can say that at least from the web interface Intellisync blows BWC away - no comparison - Nokia wins.

I will post more after I get it and have a chance to get everything going. I am really curious about the Wifi to GPRS roaming for data - should be interesting if it really works.

How's this for irony Nokia does not support the E61 with its own intellisync service yet BTW - i am using RIMS BIS 2.1 and it is really nice with server side deletion which is critical for me, too bad Nokia doesn't support that with the current BBconnect app. I would consider giving up PIN messages if they fix the server side issues......

--E61's Mail for Exchange client works very well for synchronization of calendar, PIM, and push e-mail.
--EDGE connection works well but difficult to setup automatic switch between EDGE/home WLAN. Difficult to tell which connection is active.
--I agree with above, settings menu has too many layers and not as intuitive as BB OS.
--Email indicator light setting is buggy, often requiring hard reset to turn setting "on"
--having used a BB for 3 years and switching to this device, BB is still a far superior "email" device.
--Multimedia features make the above more tolerable. I've got a 2GB miniSD card on order and looking forward to transferring a large volume of music and stop travelling with my iPOD.
--Verdict is still out for me...I'm going to purchase the SE M600i or P990i and compare it to the E61, then decide which one to keep.

I am thinking about the M600 or P990 as well. The biggest advantage of those devices in UIQ which is a totally different and better OS than s60. Major drawback is only a triband GSM radio and NO EDGE, WTF?