I have been a loyal and satisfied user of Nokia Phones since 1995. Never had a problem with any of their phones. Works right out of the box, intuitive software, does what it is supposed to do. That was then, now is a completely different story as I found out to my cost.
When I decide to get an "email" phone. My first choice was Nokia, although I did look at Samsung too (nice models). I ended up buying the E61 as it seemed to support a wide variety of email servers and had multiple connection modes. Great in theory!
In practice:
The GPRS would not work out of the box. Put the SIM in my old 6230 phone, and it works fine, put it back in the E61, no dice. Finally, the service provider set it right, but no help from Nokia whatsoever
Struggle with setting up the email boxes. Nothing intuitive about it. You have to go through complex steps to make it work. And 8 out of 10 times, it will not work the first time around. The manual is not helpful at all, when it comes to the settings. Nokia assumes that you have a corporate IT type to set up the phone and that you will not be setting up the phone yourself. Now, I am an advanced user (I even set up my home WLAN by myself) but I REALLY had to struggle with the email settings.
Phone will not connect to my PC using the supplied data cable, which incidentally works fine with my old phone (6230). Go figure.
This phone is supposed to be able to transfer all your contact/msg information from your other bluetooth phone using bluetooth transfer. HA! The E61 sets up the connection with my 6230, but after transfering between 10-15 contacts, drops the connection. Restart the connection and it transfers the same 10-15 contacts and stops. And, me with my 900 contacts on the old phone. Smartphone indeed!
Final straw on camel’s back: my messaging menu is locked up currently and there is nothing I can do to access it, including multiple resets, taking out the SIM, etc. So, I can NOT now access my sms, the two email boxes I set up, my sent box, nothing, nada, nyet. So much for owning a smart phone.
And, to add insult to injury, the Nokia Care centre is completely, utterly USELESS. I don’t know why they have even botthered to set up a call centre. Do not even THINK of emailing them, all emails to them just disappear into the ether. The call centre agents are very apologetic about all the problems you face, but they can NOT solve them. Final piece of advice I received today (after having called them thrice over the past week) and that too, after I blasted them about my messages box being locked up, is to visit the Service centre. With two days of holidays (sunday & christmas) coming up, that was really, really helpful.
Globally, Nokia has a refund policy if you return the phone within 30 days if you are not satisfied with the phone. In India? They tell you to go take a walk. And, this is supposed to be Nokia country, right? Its amazing the crap that they dump on you despite having a 50% + market share in a country addding 5mn customers per month. Or maybe, it is because of that. I said I wanted a new replacement for the phone, if they could not fix it at the service centre and not an old refurbished phone. Oh no, oh no, we can’t make any such promises to you, sucker (to your face they call you a customer)
I bought the E61 despite a few of my colleagues saying that their new Symbian OS is not stable. I wish I had listened. Buy a Windows Mobile 5 device (the new Samsung Blackjack seems to be an excellent option), if you want email capability, but DO NOT BUY this phone. It is okay for voice calls, but that is not reason you buy this phone, right? For those who have given an excellent rating just based on the design and web browsing, I challenge you to set up your email boxes by yourself! Maybe you will change your ratings after that.
Update 1, 27 Dec 2006
I took the phone to the Nokia Service Centre at Phoenix Mills, Mumbai today. They can not do anything over the counter. You have to submit the phone and it is gone for a min of 4-5 days. What really sucks about this is the disinformation given by the Nokia call centre (30303838). When they asked me to take it to the Service centre, I asked whether the phone has to be given in for repairs, they say "oh, we can not say anything, the service centre will tell you". Whereas, the fact of the matter is that the service centre WILL ask you to submit the phone for repairs. There is NO option B. So, why could the call centre not tell me this? At least, I would have carried a spare phone to switch my SIM Card. UNBELIEVABLE, USELESS CALL CENTRE. The bottom line is that if your Nokia phone works out of the box, you are lucky. If not, you are screwed. I can’t believe how much NOKIA HAS FALLEN.
Update 2, Jan 5, 2007
I got my phone back from the service centre today. The messaging was fine, except that all my old data was gone. I could not risk a restore from the backup on my memory card, as that may have been corrupted as well. So, sit and go through the rigmarole of setting up the email boxes all over again. Meanwhile, the bluetooth transfer would still not work - but now I had both my phones to show to Nokia. Finally, they solve it by setting up a sync profile on my E61 for my 6230 - nowhere in the manual can you see this "feature". AND, the transfer would still NOT transfer my old SMS from the 6230. AND, the USB cable would still not work after reaching home.
Update 3, Jan 17, 2007
I had a Nokia technician come over today to figure out the USB problem and the other problems I have been having with Nokia PC Sync. Finally, he figures out that the phone will not work through my USB hub (which works for eveything else) but needs to directly connected to the PC. Wow! But, that was the good news ... the bad news is that if you have backed up your old msgs and images via PC Sync, you can not restore to the E61 because it uses Series 60 Symbian, while the 6230 was on Series 40. Can you believe it - Nokia does not believe in backward compatability, the core of any operating platform!!! So, he tries to manually copy and transfer the images and msgs - succeeds with the images, but the msgs can not be transferred to my inbox!!! But, STILL WORSE was to follow - you can NOT BACKUP your E61 data to the PC using PC Sync, if you are running Windows XP SP2 ....UNBELIEVABLE!!!!
Bottomline: Nokia is not yet ready to play in the smartphone market. Buy this or any other Nokia smartphone at your peril. I think Windows Mobile devices or Blackberrys or the Palm platform are still miles ahead of Nokia.
Update 4 Mar 4, 2007
Looks like Nokia is putting trolls on this website to say what a great phone this is. It is amazing that people just post Nokia’s brochure from its website, and rate it a 5. If they had to actually use the phone, then they may be singing a different tune.