I finally decided to buy a a Nokia E61i PDA phone. This is a real nice phone. As usual with Nokia, the voice quality is second to none. I will not get into a detailed explanations of features, just google for it. Rather, here are some of the gotchas I ran into.
First, I needed to install the CACERT root certificate to securely access my mail server. Somehow, the Nokia does not like root certificates in either PEM or DER format. It wants the PKCS12 format exclusively. This post on the Nokia forum helped me solve this issue.
Syncing agendas and contact information works fine, both with MS Windows (at the office) using the Nokia PC Suite and at home using i Sync on a Mac. iSync requires a plugin to identify the phone, though.
Although the phone supports SIP-based VoIP out of the box, I also installed Fring, a Symbian application that lets you use Skype, Google Talk and MSN for VoIP calls. This is not yet tested.
The phone has WIFI built in and it connected with no problem to my home WLAN with WPA2. One thing you should be aware of is that the absence of a WLAN network will cause the phone to use GPRS to connect to the Internet instead. Although there is an indicator in the top left corner of the screen, it is small and you can easily miss it. Hence, if you do not wish to have an Internet enabled application to use the phone network, you need to tell it to use the WLAN only.
One thing I am missing on this phone (and other Nokias by the way) is a possibility I had on a previous Siemens S40 phone. I am living on the border of Luxembourg, Belgium and France. When at home, my phone keeps roaming on foreign networks, always trying to connect to the best signal it can get. Fine for quality but bad for the wallet. On the Siemens phone, I could create an ordered list of preferred networks. With this, it would try its home network first, only switching to another if there was no signal at all. I can force the Nokia not to roam at all, but it is a bit inconvenient.
More comments to come, I guess.
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