I’ve now started playing with a few of the applications for the Nokia E71 and they seem to vary in both usefulness and quality.

The first thing I tried was the Gmail program. Installation was easy and it does its job, although I still can’t work out how to do inline quoting so it’s better for sending new emails rather than replying to old ones.

Yahoo also provide the same sort of thing although theirs comes bundled in a rather cute package that already includes their map software, news feeds and various other plug-ins (Wikipedia, Facebook etc.). Unfortunately the mail application is rather poor (it wants to be online all the time) and it’s better to use a normal web browser for the likes of Wikipedia than the Yahoo plug-in. The one useful program so far seems to be the Flickr application, but I’ve not looked into this too much.

I’ve still got more things to play with. Opera Mini is proving useful as web sites don’t realise you’re browsing from a mobile device (I understand it’s not technically a native phone browser but is fed via Opera’s servers) and therefore you get to see the full site rather than the cut down version.