I've been using the Nokia E71 for over half a year so far.  Despite my initial impressions, I've grown to really hate the phone due to some outrageous software problems.

Bluetooth - major issues

The phone would pair with my car just fine, but within a second or two of dialing or answering an incoming call, it would disconnect.  I would then have to manually connect via the phone, and sometimes it would work.  After almost driving off the road one day, I decided to just delete the pairing and give up.

The connection with my Motorola S9 headphones (A2DP) works, but every time I power on the headphones, I have to go through a little connect/disconnect battle with the phone before they'll stay connected.  I'll power on the headphones, they'll connect to the phone, and then 5 seconds later the phone will disconnect.  I then manually initiate a connection from the phone to the headphones, and 50% of the time the connection will stay put.  For the other 50%, the phone will disconnect again after 5 seconds, and I'll have to go through the process once again.

It looks like everyone else has similar problems with the Bluetooth.  And the 110.07.127 upgrade didn't help, at all.  In fact, it made things worse with my car's handsfree link - it doesn't work at all, now.  Thankfully, the Motorola S9's still work with the same connect/disconnect issues.

Mail - 110.07.127 upgrade broke it

Prior to the 110.07.127 upgrade, I could connect (via IMAPS) to my eMail account, and keep the application open all day.  I'd receive eMail as it was delivered to my mailboxes, and everything worked well.  However, after upgrading, the eMail application seems to terminate the connection after about 20-30 minutes.  According to a packet capture, the phone doesn't even send the normal FIN/FIN+ACK/ACK sequence - the connection just goes away.  I thought this was some inactivity timer, so I setup a script to eMail myself every two minutes.  Again, after 20-30 minutes of receiving the test eMails, the application disconnected.  Crummy.

VPN - It used to work, kinda

I got it working with the original firmware with a policy-based VPN only.  I never could get XAUTH to work.  However, ever since the 110.07.127 upgrade, I can't even get the policy-based VPN configuration to work anymore.  Due to the fantastic amount (ie, none) of debugging logs available on the phone, I was forced to give up on this, too.

Memory issues and random problems

The other day, I had to delete all my eMail settings (2 accounts) and re-enter everything in from scratch.  Why?  There was one folder that had become corrupted, and resulted in either locking up the whole phone or a "memory full" message when highlighted.  Who knows.  Reading online, it seems like lots of people have this problem, too.  And there's also the "share online" feature that allows you to upload photos to your Flickr account on-the-fly.  Unfortunately, after two uses, now the application just says "System Error -1" when started.  This happened with both firmware versions.

So, what's the verdict?  Well, the phone still works, but the software is buggy as hell.  This will be my last Nokia/Symbian phone, if I don't see a software upgrade that addresses these issues, SOON.  Nokia, please QA your software, thanks!

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