We hope that this short movie will show to everyone how cool these kind of events are and that there is much to learn from other people. Camps are also a great way to hang out and meet a lot of new, interesting people.

Past few days I have noticed that being connected to my home WiFi access point with Nokia E71 cell phone does not drain the batteries as expected. In fact, with normal usage of the phone I managed to stay connected for about 48 hours. I was really amazed. On top of that I was also running twitter client – Gravity set to retrieve new twits and @replies every 15 minutes and retrieving of Direct Messages happened every two minutes.

The problem with Gravity is that it does not close the connection after an update and if you are not near your wireless access point it will use 3G (or whatever you are using) connection. An active 3G connection will drain the battery in four to five hours if you have a good battery, in most cases even sooner.

Twitter pretty much replaced my short message service. Now, here is an idea: a push service for Twitter that would be even friendlier on the battery life. Some smart phones already support push services and writing an application for that should be trivial and it was probably already done, right? The whole concept is useful in the situations where people cannot receive your text messages. Either because there is no roaming contract between two operators or receiver has to pay a ridiculous amount of money for outgoing messages and in some cases receiver is charged even for incoming messages.

Properly written mobile twitter client with push support could in fact replace texting completely for all twitter users and in global it would be cheaper for all the foreign communications. In the end it all depends on your subscription plan. For me, there is no flat rate for data transfer but 2GB of data will cost me 12€ per moth and this means around three million messages. On the other hand with my subscription plan I can send one thousand messages for free and receiving is also free, no matter who the sender is.

Increasing the connectivity and the range of communication between people has been a goal of humankind every since the first proto-language evolved. Today we carry around Star Trek communicators and we are reachable almost everywhere on the planet in a matter of seconds. For instant communication we are missing only one thing – a better battery.

Nokia E71

Cell phones are something that people change quite often, my guess would be that people replace their them every two years or so. I recently replaced mine. Most of my time I was Nokia user. There was some flirting with Motorola and Siemens, I had one Panasonic too, they all sucked compared to Nokia. Which models did I use? Why did I switch and my first experience with new Nokia E71, read on.

The list of all Nokia cell phones I had.

• Nokia 5110 – It was a while ago and I know that I was quite happy with it.
• Nokia 6310i – This was probably the best phone I had. Excellent battery life and for that time rich with features. Nowadays probably a little obsolete.
• Nokia 6630 – The biggest disappointment from Nokia. I had it for almost two years since I was stuck on a contract with my operator.
• Nokia N70 – Nice, slick and quite usefull. At some point it started rebooting itself and people started to complain that they have trouble hearing me. Also it didn’t work that well with Parrot CK-3200 Car Kit that I use.
• Nokia N95 – The only thing I hated about this phone was sliding screen. I hate that. I really don’t like phones that open, slide, flip or have any movable parts.
• Nokia E71 – Finally. After less than half year of N95 I decided to switch.

The Switch

Why did I switch so soon? From a phone that is actually one of the best phones on the market? I hated the moving part of the N95. That slider really sucks. But mostly I wanted full keyboard. QWERTY all the way. Well in my case I got the QWERTZ version since I live in a country that prefers it. I was looking into Black Berry, but the sheer bulkiness of it and the pricing was really a turn-off for me. Nokia E71 was barely released on the market and I had quite some trouble finding reseller that had it on stock.

The Phone

I could describe the package first. But I didn’t really bother of looking into it. I took out charger, which is the same as for N95, battery, phone and leather sleeve. Yes, E71 comes with a fancy looking leather sleeve that fits nicely around the phone. However after few days of usage it became clear that you have to pull out your phone from that sleeve each time you need to answer it and it gets a little bit annoying, so the sleeve is now sitting on my desk, not being used.

E71 comes with a display that is wider than higher, it has resolution of 320×240. Nice change from more common 240×320 and it is better for browsing and reading messages and emails. This phone is feature packed as N95. It has a GPS, Bluetooth, WiFi, IR, … Together with all other junk that has been around for years and it is not really worth mentioning (camera, ringtones, screen savers, java, mp3 support, …).

User interface is quite standard for Nokia phones. Symbian S60 in god knows which generation, the only important difference is they keyboard. It is a full keyboard with 37 keys, not counting function keys for firing up calendar, phone book, messages, … Two thumbs typing is possible, keys are still small and people with larger, thicker fingers will have trouble pressing only one key at a time even my bony fingers hit two keys time to time. E71 uses Symbian OS 9.2, S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1.

Connectivity with this phone is quite good. It is a quad-band phone, so basically no matter where in the world you are, you’ll have something to connect to. While reading specs I was sort of expecting that there will be an option to send smoke signals.

After extensive use, I must say that there aren’t many cons with this phone. Until now I noticed two things that were a problem. First thing is the absence of numerical keys. They are present, but they are tiny compared to other phones. And second thing, the only thing about this phone that really pisses me off is Micro-USB connector. E71 has a Micro-B type of USB receptable. Micro-USB is a new type of USB connector that was introduced early in January 2007. So far this is the first device that I’ve seen using it. Nokia provides a USB cable with the phone so there should be no trouble connecting it to your computer. Unless you’re like me. Too lazy to crawl under your desk with your fingers crossed hoping that you will find a free USB port. So, my E71 is still not connected. Nokia N95 came with Mini USB and my Nikon camera has Mini USB and my older Sony camera has Mini USB and iPod has … Oh wait, iPod is made by Apple, forget it. Nobody that I know has Micro-USB cable, I don’t have it at work, so now I’m gonna have to carry this new cable around with me.

Let’s feel it

Phone nicely fits in your palm, it is smooth and uhhm… Who cares how phone feels in my hand. It ceratinly doesn’t leave a mouth-watering feeling. Grip is good. I am not going to feel things for you people.

For who?

Who might have a use for E71 you ask? Do you use Putty and IRC often and can’t live without them? Do you actually know what a terminal emulator is? How many text messages do you write per day, too many? How abouy, writing e-mails? If you answered yes on at least couple of questions above, then go for it. Otherwise, get it only if you want to brag in front of your buddies trying to impress them with text messages typed on a Qwerty keyboard.

All in all it is a nice, usefull product from Nokia with its a little bit specific target audience which will surely love it.