The E61 is the first QWERTY business smartphone from Nokia, and has been touted as the Blackberry killer. It's optimized for e-mail, and has special features for e-mail such as an Inbox shortcut key, an indicator for incoming e-mail, and so on. With the E61, Nokia has departed from their notebook designs to an elegant, executive one.

The brilliant 320x240 active matrix display lends the phone a Palm-ish feel. Its screen supports 16 million colours. There is the 75 MB of onboard memory, which can be ofcourse be expanded via the miniSD card slot. Expect Nokia to bundle at least a 64 MB card with the phone - that's goodish bit of memory for a business phone.

The phone not only supports quad-band, but is also WCDMA-enabled- and so can be used anywhere in the world. The Nokia E61 comes with attachment viewers and editors for features of MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Then there's MS Outlook contacts and calendar. It also supports Acrobat Reader and Zip manager, as well as several third-party e-mail clients including BlackBerry Connect.

The phone plays MP3 and AAC, and can stream 3GP and RealMedia cntent. The connectivity spectrum spans Bluetooth, Pop Port and IR. There's no camera inbuilt, but this can be a virtue since many corporate offices ban the use of camera phones.

I did read about this phone a couple of months back on allaboutsymbian.com . The phone has excellent features for corporate users and a brilliant display. But the keypad doesn't look as comfortable as that of Communicator 9500. Moreover, the phone is massive in size! And it doesn't have touchscreen either, which is essential for a PDA. I would prefer the SonyEricsson P910i instead. Its a true PDA cum mobile phone. I have never liked the Blackberry and neither does this phone appeal to me. The lack of camera is also a drawback.
But then I'm a student. The demands of corprorate users from a phone are much different.

Here's how the phone looks like:

For a detailed preview of the phone go to:
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/features/it..._Generation.php

It makes you think why NOKIA never released a similar thing before. Oh, but they had, those Communicator series! But we like our keyboard to be so tiny I think my finger will press 5 or 6 times at a time. This is very functional, but not really usable for me.