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Disclamer: I *was* affilated with Nokia.

1. With no SIM, you can’t turn off the sound. I do not have an extra SIM at the moment, and I can’t stop disturbing my neighbours with beeping keys. I know that the “profile” is stored in the SIM, but that does not make me happier.

2. It comes with some pre-installed SW, which I can’t remove. I’ll never need these “business catalogs”, but the icon takes the screen space in the most frequently used menu, and there’s no option to remove it.

3. I had some SW installed in the memory card. After phone re-flashing, that SW seems to be missing… no, just taking the memory. But not available for re-installation. The only way to make things consistent seems to be the reformatting of the memory card - the provided file manager (which is hidden in the “office” menu, by some reason) does not show these apps on the card.

4. Help system is fantastically idiotic. I tried to read help 3 times; all the three times it said “in order to save your settings, select save settings from the menu”. There are things which are not obvious to me, for example, meaning of tiny icons. Colleagues told me the lock on top of bold X means “connected to encrypted WLAN”, key inserted in a hanging lock stays for “registered with SIP server” - so intuitive. It is not said anywhere in the help.

5. I’d like to have at least the following applications: usable file manager, screen capture, plain text editor. None is preinstalled. There is a menu “Download applications”, which opens the browser at http://ea.mobile.nokia.com/content/spin/ea/E61/en/app. That useful page provides two applications: “Handy Expense” and “Quickoffice”.

6. Menus have option to be displayed either as icon grid (12 icons fit on the screen), or as “list” (5 list items fit). I’d like them to be more tight, at least smaller icons or just text; OK, maybe I’m expecting too much for 400€ device. But some menus - such as “Tools -> Settings” - are shown only as “list”; probably to practice scrolling.

7. Web browser. It has some nice features and it renders pages pretty well. But:

• While the page is being downloaded (which can take long for a mobile device), half of the menu is disabled. You can’t zoom/unzoom, toggle images on/off - have to watch the unreadable page until it downloads completely.
• Menu items “(in/de)crease image size” also (in/de)crease the font size. Good that with several more keypresses fonts can be returned back into the discernable state.
• No option “open link in new window”.
• No option to save the page!
• When loading a very long (1MB) text-only page, I got message “Not enough memory”. (The phone has 64MB of internal memory.)

8. WLAN connectivity is very poor. I have a number of WLAN devices at home, all work fine, but this one says “No WLAN network found” two times out of three when I try.

Other people’s rants:

• Moshe Yudkowsky at O’Reilly

Of course this does not mean that the phone is “bad”. First, it has many nice features (I’d point out nice rendering of web pages; not a surprise as it is based on KHTML) - look for them elsewhere. Second, no matter how many problems it has, other smartphones may have even more.

Update 10.7.2007:

• I’m receiving a file via Bluetooth. The “messaging” application can’t open it unless it is one of “known types”, and there is no option to save it anywhere into the filesystem! You can “save to folder”, but the choice is only folders in the “messaging”, which is a filesystem on its own.
• I’m writing a note. I can not save it anywhere neither. It stays in some place called “Notes”.
• The stock file manager is simply a shame. The working alternative I found is Y-Browser by Jukka Silvennoinen.