Nokia E61i
Here’s my S60-powered Nokia E61i, resplendent in its cheap and cheerful crystal case.
As you can see from this photo opp in front of a Fido van (for some long-since forgotten campaign) I was pretty happy with this Eseries device. In many ways it was a culmination of every smartphone I had owned prior. It was sturdy, like any other Nokia. It had a qwerty keypad worthy of a BlackBerry or hiptop. And like my TyTN it supported 3G and WiFi.
The 3G only worked in Europe and Asia, though — good thing, because Fido’s data service at the time was laughable. $10 CAD/month sounds entirely reasonable, but in 2007 it was good for a mere 12 MB of data. If that sounds bad, I was previously paying $25/month for 3 MB!
It works in Japan! Here’s a photo of the famous Shibuya Crossing, taken with the E61i’s 2 megapixel camera — not bad for a night shot with a 2007-vintage camera phone.
The E61i proved its mettle as a travel companion almost immediately on a trip to New Zealand. In addition to Tokyo it also accompanied me to such faraway places as Buenos Aires and Egypt. For the longest time I couldn’t figure out why my blog posts about the latter were getting so many hits — until I finally learned that the Bluetooth GPS accessory I had brought to Cairo with me was, in fact, illegal. Oops.
Damn, that’s a sexy phone.
Why, thanks. 🙂
Wonder what Whatleydude was rocking as a sidearm back in July of 2007? Ah, I see…
Ha!
You linking back to that old post made me realise that all the images hadn’t ported over when I moved from VOX to WordPress. Have spent the last couple of days moving everything over!!
Git 😉
(that part of my blog is now better though, so thank you for that)
Np. Passive-aggressive link love is my specialty. 😉
I almost got the E61i in 2007.
It was time for me to renew my contract and I was offered either the E61i or the Sony Erricson K800i. I decided that a good camera with a real flash (yeah! real xenon flash and not just some dim LED light) were more important to me than some “Smart” phone.
Hindsight being 20/20 and all that, I’d choose the E61i over the K800i today.
And my next phone became the E71… Lovely phone, almost 4 years later I still have it (although ATM it is being repaired after some idiot decided it would make a good projectile…) as a backup
You have good taste in phones, sir.
My next chapter — after I go back to Part Two and add in something I missed — will be about my white E71. 🙂
I’m looking forward to that chapter.
Ha! My first smartphone was the direct precursor to yours, an E61, bought off of Craigslist. Had it for almost a year, a good part of that on pay-as-you-go on Rogers (just brutal with the data!), then on Fido too. No NAM 3G either, and perhaps worse, no camera! But I really loved it. Gave it to my bro who used it for a while in France. He still has it, and as of Feb 2012, it still boots!
You sure it was the E61 and not the E62, right? I’ll never forgive Robbers for that…