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During the tenure of my love/hate relationship with the device, my carrier, Vodafone Australia, offered me a free Nokia 6680 which I gave a serious shot with for two weeks. I was able to replace my most needed application, SplashMoney, with Xcite Software's XSFinance, and quite obviously, the phone related aspects of the 6680, along with its stability, were vastly superior, but... I just couldn't get past the absence of QWERTY, and returned to the Treo soon thereafter.

The Palm OS naturally started to stagnate, and with the sale to Access, and the virtual discontuation of Cobalt, Palm's lack of WiFi support in the Treo, and Palm's soon-to-be-released successor to the 650 which was an abyssmal effort for a product 2 years in development from the 650, I was ripe for change.

I watched with baited breath the rumors, pre-announcement, and release of the E61 and got in line immediately.

So, how does it compare?

I won't delve into hardware and software comparisons as it has been well covered before, except a mention of the keyboard, which while requiring a bit of a harder press, it's much more roomy, and occasionally when revisiting with the Treo, the Treo's keyboard feels small and cramped, and overall the Treo looks and feels as dated as a 2-generation-old-iPod.

What I'd like to focus on in this review is software.

First on deck is the common complaint from Palm OS users regarding the lack of a full system search. This was soon rectified with the gray market release of the E50's Nokia Search utility. In my mind, it was even a slight advancement, as I could selectively choose which areas/applications I wanted to search, thus optimizing my results.

Next on deck is the web experience. Being a Mac user, having the same rendering engine of Safari on my mac also on the E61 by virtue of the S60 Browser (based on Apple's open source WebKit), makes for a fantastic visual experience. Blazer on the Treo was unstable, incompatible junk. There are definite usability issues with the S60 browser, specifically the lack of a page down/page up ability as the momentum picked up by naturally trying to scroll an approximate page at a time is poorly thought out. Also, being unable to copy text from a page stings at times, but application multitasking makes visual reading, switching apps, and then typing a possibility.

Of course, I might quickly stick in the HUGE fact that the E61 can multitask!!!! I had the Pocket Oxford Dictionary with the MSDict application on my Treo (and now on the E61), but due to the regular need to trash the Treo's global preference file, I would have to re-serialize my applications. I had SplashID on the device keeping a database of all my serial numbers synchronized with my Mac. SplashID would luckily let me open it in trial mode to copy out my serial numbers and paste them back into all the requiring apps. Unfortunately, MSDict did not permit pasting, and launching SplashID, hand writing down the 30 character serial, closing SplashID, launching MSDict and entering the serial was an annoying experience. I hate paper! With the E61's multitasking, this type of neanderthal process is not needed! I've noticed some users complain about the inability for the S60 browser to save website passwords (not sure if Blazer can, but don't think so), but the S60 browser can indeed store passwords, but only the HTTP authentication variety and it must be stored in the bookmark. Also, like Safari on OS X, the S60 browser can detect if you are using 3G/GPRS and only load downsampled images, thus saving some users from costly download charges. However, unlike Safari, it lacks the ability to load the full resolution version of the image or all images on the page.

The Bluetooth support is great! The inability for Treos to have more than one connection simultaneously meant I couldn't use a GPS and car kit or headset simultaneously. I ended up purchasing a TomTom Go 500 to deal with that limitation and after a firmware upgrade on both the TomTom and Treo, I got the two talking although I had to write a Mac OS X Address Book to TomTom address book AppleScript to get the numbers on the TomTom. To the Treo's advantage, it doesn't maintain a Bluetooth connection with headsets and car kits. It works in more of an on-demand way. When the Treo rings, it then conencts to the TomTom, and vice versa, when I told the TomTom to make a call, it would only then connect to the Treo. The E61 and TomTom insist on holding hands at all times, thus surely affecting the E61's battery life adversly, but at least not blocking other Bluetooth communication.

Speaking of multiple communications, the way the E61 handles network communications is fantasic. I can have my phone browsing the web over WiFi, have the IM application connected over 3G, and STILL use the device as a Bluetooth modem for my Mac... amazing! Also, there is the widely discussed and praised Access Point Groups feature, allowing you to create a grouping of access points, be them WiFi, 3G, wired, etc. in a ranking order for your applications to scale with based on availability. You can even define unique SMTP configurations per access point (helpful for some locations that don't allow you to speak directly with your own mail server). However, this fantastic feature, as Jason O'Grady pointed out before me is limited to the Messaging application only! The Web app lets you set in its prefs a default access point, or to always ask, but you can't choose a group in the default selector! Ludicrous! There's some other oddities regarding network selection, e.g. the IM application only allows you to choose 3G/GPRS access points for communication. WiFi is not an option. Why, Nokia, why?

I personally use IMAP mail with the Messaging application so can't comment on the BlackBerry or Exchange support. Both my personal and work accounts are configured and for both, I was able to Bluetooth a self-created root certificate authority file from my Mac to the phone which both the Messaging and Web apps respect and understand. The Treo could not accept such certificates, but at least VersaMail would not balk at the use of self-signed certificate, which is possibly a benefit or a negative depending on how you looked at it. The E61 does not have the ability to store sent mail on the IMAP server (nor deleted), and the Treo, while having this option in its prefs, never was able to do it with my Cyrus IMAP servers. The Nokia allows you to send a copy of mail to yourself, and with the clever use of server side Sieve mail filtering, my IMAP server puts these sent mails in the Sent folder thus not forcing me to receive a new email every time I send a email. While the Treo lacks multitasking and IMAP Idle support, it does have a background process to check mail regularly, albeit this is broken when used with SSL. Neither the Nokia nor Treo understand the server side Drafts folder which is unfortunate.

Treo users will miss the display of SMS's in a chat like, threaded fashion. I do.

With instant messenging, towards the end of my Treo days, I was using pre-release previews of an application named Toccer which is a direct connect AIM client. It also, like VersaMail had some background processing abilities and supported the Palm notification manager making it a great AIM client. The Nokia, like so many of its brethren made by primarily cellular manufacturers comes with the overly hyped, rarely deployed, implementation of an IMPS/Wireless Village IM client. If your carrier doesn't have an IMPS server, like so few do, you can try to find some free alternatives, like the infamous Yamigo, SmartVAS and Speago. Like Jabber servers, some IMPS servers can have server side transports which allow you to connect to AIM, MSN and other services via an IMPS client. Unfortunately, I and many other never got Yamigo to work, althougha few days ago, I successfully got chatnu.dk, another free service, with AIM & MSN transports to work successfully, with caveats, i.e. Buddy list support seems limited to 30 people, and the delivery and receipt of IMs is unfortunately pretty unreliable. Yamigo, SmartVAS,ChatNU are both free services kindly offerend and maintained by individuals in their private time, so acceptance of their limitations are your only option. AgileMessenger and IM+ are commercially offered multi-protocol IM clients, but Agile uses a proxy (a big no no for me) and IM+ choked on my 100+ buddy list and the interface of both are exceedingly contrasting to the OS in general. I maintain my own Jabber server with AIM and MSN transports and hoped that I could find a good Jabber client to provide me with my much desired, multi-protocol experience. However, the only clients I could find were J2ME based (read: ugly, slow and buggy) and none supported SSL, thus that path was also a dead end.

Office document compatibility is sound, and built-in, similar to the Treo, although I had the Treo for nearly a year before I had access to a native PDF viewer on it, which I found in the form of PalmPDF and is also now available in the most recent DocumentsToGo which are bundled with newer Treos. The built in Zip Manager on the Nokia is also a boon. Both devices have a great freeware screenshot utility available for each as well.

The biggest negative for me has been the absence of SplashMoney or a viable alternative. XSFinance, which as discussed, was quite a good alternative, has not been updated for Symbian 3rd Edition. In June, Xcite Software informed me that they hoped to have an updated version in the next 3 to 6 months. I patiently await. Epocware, the maker of many fine Symbian goods has helped me in this area with HandyExpense, which I have widgeted to fit my needs for the time being. It does not support account transfer (I instead enter two transaction, one positive, one negative), nor automated transaction, nor upcoming transactions. I regularly export the data to CSV, import into FileMaker on my Mac, and work it from there. Using the Report -> Paid With Report, I can always get a standing of where each of my accounts are at.

This is probably a perfect segue to explain the decisions regarding Symbian 3rd Edition and 3rd party applications. As I understand it, the decision was made to start the Symbian Signed program. Basically, as a 3rd party developer, you send in your application to be evaluated, and if successful, the application is signed with a Symbian certificate which then allows 3rd edition devices to install it and if desired by the developer, permit certain activities, for example, being able to access protected parts of the file system. This process costs money, but Symbian Signed have also set up an avenue for freeware developers which reduces or completely avoids this cost. Developers can still release software that is not signed by Symbian, but it must be at least self-signed with a roll-your-own certificate, and users of devices must first go and alter a buried preference to even allow that, and lastly, self-signed applications have limits that can NOT be overridden, like the aforementioned ability to browse certain areas of the file system, no matter what. Firstly, as a user coming from the Palm OS platform, observing what I perceive to be the number 3 position that Symbian holds in 3rd party developer support, I find this decision pretty crazy! I'm of the opinion that Symbian needs to do EVERYTHING it can to attract 3rd party developers, and this flies in the face of that reality. Secondly, and even more infuriating, is that similar to the promises of Intel's Trusted Computing Platform, I, the owner of this device, AM NOT TRUSTED TO PERMIT WHAT I SEE AS FIT! I understand that the proposed principle of this decision is device safety and security, and the conspiracy theorist in me sees it as another excuse for a revenue stream, and as badly as this raises the barrier to entry, the fact that I can't override it kills me. As my friend Stephen Colbert says, "Moving on..."

So, the status and quantity of 3rd party application is regularly discussed and is often heated. I'm of the opinion that lots of applications aren't needed, as long as the bases are covered. I find that concept similar to comparisons made regarding the availability of software for Windows vs. the Mac OS. There have always been fewer options for the Mac OS, but the best application in each genre was always comparable, thus, all the extra apps on the other platform were usually mediocre and below. I feel this philosophy does apply to Symbian, but unfortunately, especially in the example of financial applications, NOT all bases are covered. In the linked article, Steve Litchfield discounts many of the recent complains about lack of applications stating that with a modern web browser and modern connectivity, it's not needed. I wonder if he uses GoogleCalendar and Gmail in his S60 browser instead of the native apps. Hurrumph.

Back to the comparison of the two devices, the PIM applications in my opinion are quite comparable, although the Nokia gets a bit of flak in this area. My data entry is probably evenly split between my Mac and phone, and the synchronization between the Nokia and the Mac is FAR superior to that of the Treo or other Palm OS devices. While there are a couple of free iSync Plugins available for the Mac, I had initial trouble with time zones, and bought the bullet and bought Novamedia's iSync plugin which has worked flawlessly (I've heard that the free options work fine now as well.) Virtually every field (with slight exception) is synchronized. Early in the Nokia's life, i created a contact using every possible field possible and sync'd it over to see what would make it, and it faired quite well. All day event synchronization from the Mac to Nokia is a bit annoying. I get meetings from 12:00 am to 11:59 pm. The Nokia calendar has an event type called a Memo, which behaves in every way like you'd expect an all day event to, but it lacks the ability to have alarms attached or be repeated, thus not usable multi-day events. However, in my testing, I found that creating a Nokia calendar memo and syncing properly created an iCal all day event on the Mac. If I extended that all day event to span multiple days and synched, the Nokia properly had the memo attached to each day. I wrote Novamedia to point this out and ask if it was possible to use this Memo functionality, but it took two requests to get the condescending, "No" I received. Another shortcoming, although I'm not sure which supplier is to blame, is that any iCal birthday that predates 1980 DOES NOT GET synchronized, and thus, nor do any of its repeats, so I keep forgetting about the birthdays of my friends over the age of 26, which is quite common. Neither the Treo nor Nokia understand OS X's Address Book Groups or iCal's different calendars, but the Nokia synchronizes To Do alarms with iCal and the Treo does not. The Treo also can't handle multiple address, is limited to 5 phone numbers or email addresses whereas the Nokia is relational in this area. Another nice touch for the Nokia is the fact that OS X's Address Book pictures are synchronized with the Nokia Contacts, and the E61 shows said pictures for both incoming and outbound calls. Is Nice!

Lastly on the topic of syncing, as Apple promised when they first announced iSync, SyncML is now supported in the latest version of iSync and on the Nokia, thus no iSync Agent is needed. Also, the phone gives great feedback (better than iSync actually) regarding what changes were made and what was synced in which direction. Palm HotSync Manager with its iSync plugin is no where near as tantalizing, and The Missing Sync has never been reliable in my experience to trust it with data so important to me. While HotSync Manager is a bit dated, it of course is extensible meaning I could synchronize SplashID data along with all sorts of other 3rd party apps and most importantly, HotSync Manager would backup my ENTIRE device at every sync!

Backup on the Nokia is a bit rough. There's an included Memory application which allows you to backup your device to your card (and of course restore it). The resulting file is named Backup.arc but no arc expanders I've found understand Nokia's proprietary use of the format here (shame on you Nokia!) Additionally, the stupid 3rd edition lockdown makes it impossible for me to use the included File Manager to send the backup file to my Mac. ARRrrrrrrgggggghhhhhhh! So, what I've resolved to do for now is manually run the backup before bed each night, and remove the miniSD card from my phone and leave it on my night table each day. On the Treo, I had an automated nightly backup to the SD card, and the aforementioned full device backup every sync. I miss that.

I'll never be able to comprehend why neither of these devices has a decent, multi-day alarm clock. It's mindnumbing that I have to set my alarm for waking up for work EVERY night before i go to bed. Absolute rubbish! Both apps have nice World Clocks, but the absence of the above is just plain stupid. I played with Epocware's HandyClock for a bit, but it had initial bugs with being unable to cancel an alarm on an E61, and to fix it, they removed the ability to snooze, so I'm back to settin' my alarm manually with the bundled Clock app every night.

The Palm OS has an application named Prefs which is this great, centralized location to setup all of your device's settings. It is also extensible so that 3rd party developers can also include options here as well. The E61 is unnecessarily riddled with mamy applications to set various device settings, namely Settings, Themes, Profiles, Bluetooth, E-mail key, etc. I've heard many a user say something like, "I don't remember where I did it, but my device is now reading the names of callers and I can't find where to turn it off." This is definitely an unintuitive obstacle for the average cellphone user. By the way, regarding the feature where phone does speak the name of the caller in a robotic voice, it's explained that this is there to help you understand how your phone interprets the names of your contacts, as you don't set voice tags for voice calling, you just say the name. I'm not big on voice calling or hearing the name, until my boss, a recent purchaser of a Nokia N73 with the same feature pointed out the benefit being that if your phone is on the other side of the room and ringing, you know who's calling without getting up. I since reactivated the feature... after spending 10 minute remembering where it was (Profiles).

The Nokia also has USB Mass Storage support built in meaning that your phone can acts as a miniSD card reader without any software to install on modern computers of any operating system. Unfortunately, the internal memory is not also available, and it's not very Mac friendly. When you used under Windows, and you're done, using the Safely Remove hardware command properly tells the Nokia that it's done. On a Mac, ejecting the disk icon does not provide the same feedback to the Nokia forcing you to disconnect the Nokia and receiving a stern warning from the Nokia that you've been bad. The 3rd party application Card Export by Softick for the Treo provides the identical functionality for the Treo and is a bit more Mac (and thus, Mass Storage compliant?) friendly. On the Treo, I had also used another Softick produc called BlueFiles which enabled you to browse, get and send files to and from the Treo's internal memory and/or card over Bluetooth. The Nokia has this Bluetooth FTP (?) server/service built in, but yet again... crippled by the platform security.

The Nokia's got HP JetDirect and LPR (both over WiFi) support in addition to Bluetooth and Infrared printing, supported by all the office apps and others. I configured my HP LaserJet 5100 without issue, printed an email once to prove I could, and haven't touched it since, but alas, it's there.

The built in Connection Manager application turns the Nokia into a simple pocket WiFi scanner, and the recently released WLAN Wizard (intended for the N80 Internet Edition) takes it a bit further allowing it to auto-define protected access points, a limitation of the E61's built in software (secure access points must be manually created).

The Active Standby screen on the Nokia is fantastic. You can have six applications spread across the top, see the messages from the mailbox of your choice (SMS's are considered a mailbox), and the calendar shows you the next entry and you have a total number of To Do's listed as well.

I think I've pretty much covered everything relevant to me. I've never been a big fan of phone camera quality, so didn't mind the absence of a camera, but have been disappointed in its absence for the sake of quick improptu photos. I don't use any of the multimedia aspects of the device (it's a business phone, remember? ;-) so I won't comment there.

Not, last, but definitely not least, the reason the Nokia E61 is the best thing since sliced bread!

VOIP

Nokia had the infinited wisdom to do what every cellular carrier in the world will now hate them for, and that was to include a tightly integrated SIP over WiFi (actually works poorly over 3G too!) client into the phone.

Now, two or three months ago when I started to try and get this to work with my ISP's bundled VOIP service, and a few of the other big providers out there, e.g. Gizmo Project, information was scarce and success was unattainable. There were reports and copied emails directly from Nokia that stated that the SIP client could not work from behind a NAT router (due to a lack of STUN support), and that it was designed to be connected to corporate VOIP PBXs on the same LAN as the phone.

However, slowly but surely, people started reporting success with various providers, namely gizmoproject.com and voiptalk.org. I got Gizmo Project working, behind my NAT router, but the quality was abyssmal. I tried many of the other people recommended, but I really wanted to get it working with my ISP's (iiNet) service. Low and behold, a wonderful person posted his successful configuration on forums.whirlpool.net.au, which I mirrored, and it worked, and the quality was AWESOME! For a few weeks though, I couldn't get incoming calls to work, and I had moved house and my cellular reception was useless and I got a landline with a cheap monhtly fee in return for very expensive call rates (only needed it for ADSL) so I needed to get incoming calls working. I ended up changing one of the settings recommended in that forum, and everything worked!!! I was gleeful.

Now, there's two additional settings that make this what I believe to be the killer app. Firstly, you can set VOIP registration to be "When Needed" or "Always On" and you can set your default call type to "Internet" or "Cellular". If you have it set to "Internet" and registration set to "Always On", when you get within range of the WiFi access point defined in the VOIp settings, the Nokia auto-connects and registers to the VOIP server and by default makes all calls via VOIP! So that means that without thinking, if I'm at home and navigate to a contact and press call, the Nokia trys to do it over the internet first. If I'm not home, it only pauses for quick second to check for the presence of my WiFi network and when not found, naturally makes a cellular call. So, my Nokia transforms into a cordless landline phone with super cheap call rates when I'm at home, and returns to being a cell phone when I'm out!

This feature to me is the clear future of the phone market and makes the Nokia E61 the best handheld device I've seen, used and owned. Don't get me wrong, the rest of the phone is great too, and people will have their own opinions of why they came from a Treo to the Nokia and possibly went somewhere after that. But I'm thrilled to say, "Bye bye" to Palm, and "Hello" to Nokia