Am I missing something? He lists three requirements for a new phone:

- decent mp3 player - laptop tethering - good Exchange synchronization

Then he spends the rest of the review explaining why the E71 doesn't meet those requirements.

Seriously, at one point he says: "I’ve been desperately trying to get Merlin Mann’s Inbox Zero concept working and you need a great Exchange client, not a 1.0 Exchange client."

Then, two paragraphs later: "Nokia’s built in Exchange synchronization is very 1.0."

Yes, but he manages to find 3rd party applications that work nicely. For example, in the case of the web browser, he raves about opera mini.

Perhaps the key for Nokia is to just ship those apps natively instead of rolling their own.

The iPhone validates another company's product+market. Most of the whiz-bang features cited are not really that remarkable these days, even in feature-phones, let alone smartphones.

That said, I'm not sure why you'd pick this phone over a Blackberry 8300:

- The Blackberry is the reference standard for corporate mail integration.

- The camera in the 8100 at least is absolutely rocking, judging from this picture on the front page of Reddit right now (Mosquito larvae, some people are weirded out by it -- http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/42132/IMG00056.jpg ).

- I believe the music player is comparably acceptable but unimpressive.

- Comments about browsing both seem to end with "but that's ok, you can run Opera Mini on it"

Well, it looks like the 8300 still have that lovely ball that is the center of the phone's UI, and that totally stops functioning when it gets the smallest speck of dust on it. Is the ball of the 8300 removable, or is it like the 8100, where you are totally unable to use any of the menus (or most of the applications) of the phone for the 5-15 minutes that it can easily take to get the speck of dust worked out of the ball's socket?

Also, nokia phones tend to be very liberal about bluetooth bonding; they'll export all their capabilities to anything. With my 8100, it will only advertise its DUN profile to my powerbook. It won't show that profile when I'm attempting to pair it with my nokia 770, which is pretty lame. Apparently the blackberry network is very fragile, and could easily be taken down by rogue bluetooth stacks using the DUN profile of bluetooth enabled phones, or something...

Anyhow, I'm holding out for a nice 3G nokia, or maybe an android phone, to replace my irritating 8100.

Wait for next week's blog, when he discovers the joys of Series60 programming.

Yeah, Symbian API and the entire SDK is complete bullshit. Sadly I have to use it for past three years :-(.

I can't wait for Nokia to launch a no-keyboard, display only phone -- and see how that compares with the iPhone.

With this: http://www.engadget.com/2008/01/23/nokia-files-virtual-keybo...