As I mentioned before, I wanted to compare the N900 I’m testing to the E71 I’m currently using as my main phone. While the Nokia N900 blog has already done a comparison of the technical specs of the N900 with the E72 and so has Blog Giraffe; and while for the most part, the comparison holds true for the E71; there are some differences, particularly with the camera, and neither went into too much qualitative detail of how the comparison holds up in day-to-day usage, and as we all know, winning in tech specs on paper doesn’t always translate to being a better device in real life.
For example, bootup speed. The tech specs say the E71 should take longer to get from cold to ready with it’s ARM11 processor clocking in at 369MHz to the N900’s 600MHz. In practice, however, the N900 from turn-on to entering the PIN takes 23 seconds versus 25 for the E71; but from turn-on to ready to being ready to make/receive a call, both phones take an almost identical time of 50 seconds (to within a second). So let’s look at the devices in real life usage.
The quality of the screen is far lower on the E71. For icons and the like, it’s not something you’d notice, but for any kind of complex graphic (like an image), and especially when looking at both screens side-by-side, it’s very obvious that the N900 is far superior to the E71 here.
In terms of ease of use… well, I’m not yet quite ready to call that one. The N900 feels more awkward for tasks common to both phones like making phone calls, or twittering; but I’m not fully used to the N900 yet, it’s hampered by the problem I’m having with it with bug 6063 (more on that later) and it uses different twitter clients (Gravity on the E71 is far more polished than Witter on the N900 at the moment; however that probably will change with more development time). Overall, it feels more like the E71 is more autonomous as a device, while the N900 is more reactive; but I want a few more days to get used to the N900 to be sure it’s the device and not the user.
Let’s take a look at both devices side-by-side.
