You've got to love Alvin Wong's hardware experiments. Even more than me, he loves taking something old and unloved and making it work in 2013. In this case, being disappointed by the distinctly un-smartphone-like behaviour of the Nokia Ashas and so going in search of something for the same value or less, from yesteryear, that should offer more functionality. Alvin plumped for the Nokia E71, a QWERTY classic, and (as always) his experiences make for an enjoyable read.

Alvin writes:

The company’s insistence on branding what is rather obviously a line of feature-phones as smartphones is unmatched by any other company. Why is it irritating? Well, in my opinion, calling Asha phones “smartphones” is plainly incorrect. It does not take a great deal of intelligence to see that Asha phones are not even in the same league as Nokia’s own Lumia 520. Asha phones do not run natively-coded third party applications. Asha phones do not even pretend to run more than one app or process at a time. Asha phones can be slow and pokey. The Series 40 OS that Asha phones run on is clearly less functional compared to most other smartphone platforms. Asha phones are not smartphones, and calling them what they aren’t in reality is not something I agree with.

Spurred on by this thought, I wondered if it was indeed possible to buy an actual smartphone for what it would cost to buy a new Asha phone or less. At the time of writing, the Asha 311 was on sale for Rs. 6375, the Asha 205 was priced at Rs. 3523 and the Asha 305 cost a shade under Rs. 4400. Keeping all that in mind, this is what I’ve ended up with (if you visited the site on April Fools’, you’d have seen this already): the most successful QWERTY-monoblock S60 smartphone Nokia ever made.

Unveiled in 2008, there was a time when E71s were a common sight. While its successors never quite achieved the same level of popularity that it did, the E71 brought a huge dose of mainstream consumer appeal into Nokia’s fledgling Eseries lineup. From the E71, E66 and E51 onwards, Eseries devices were no longer boring silver blocks meant for business and enterprise use; they were smartphones that you’d actually want to buy. What made the E71 especially appealing at the time was the fact that it packed high-end hardware specifications (as far as Symbian devices at the time were concerned) in a slim and downright beautiful form-factor swathed in stainless steel. The E71 continues to be one of Nokia’s best-built devices and a true classic today.

Now, the E71 was acquired from an online forum’s classifieds section and cost me just S$50. I picked up a brand-new BP-4L battery for it that set me back a further S$29. That amounts to just under Rs. 3500, and it’s not like I picked up a battered and damaged specimen of an E71; it had been well taken care of in a flip case with a screen protector applied. The only physical faults on this device are rather minor – the rubber flaps that used to cover the microUSB port and microSD card slot have hardened and fallen off, and there is a little gap between the top edge of the keyboard and the bottom edge of the display that allows some of the backlight to leak through. Neither of these issues are particularly major; the jet-black stainless steel finish remains as good as new, and the phone works like a charm.

Read on for the full article.

I'll update this post (or write a new one) if and when Alvin writes up his experiences further. Watch this space.

I'd been meaning to have a go with the E72 again for a while now, loving the form factor, finding HD text on the E6's display a bit too small to read at times, and recognising that the E72 had a truck load of tech improvements over the E71 (though, sadly, not quite the same truck-like build quality). See here for my E72 pimping piece that goes over most of the changes between the two smartphones.

I will get round to this, I promise. There's just so much to do... Worry points for me about using the E72 in 2013? Media consumption would be a big no-no - I guess this is an aspect of convergence which wasn't considered five years ago!