Nokia E71 or iPhone 3G ?

I am looking for a fresh replacement for my faithful Samsung i600. Or may be not... The i600 somehow never made it to the front page, but it is really hard to beat. I know there are a number of people who just cannot imagine "Windows on a mobile phone". But the i600 is one of the best Windows Mobile implementation ever. Of course it can hardly be considered as a great success, as it took Microsoft ten years or so to arrive at this point, while the system still has its shortcomings. But it does work and delivers what is important for me: QWERTY keyboard in a small package plus basic Web browsing and excellent implementation of an email client, together with push capability. The Windows Mobile email application has been finally sorted out in version 6. The 6 has brought the forever - awaited HTML email support. Plus it can natively import personal certificates, necessary to read secure / encrypted email messages.

So what is the i600 lacking and why I consider upgrading it? Well, basically there are three points on my wishlist:

1. The US 850MHz GSM band. i600 is a tri - band GSM (900, 1800, 1900) plus one - band UMTS (2100) phone. Going to the US, especially outside metropolitan areas, I have no coverage. The 850MHz band would definitely help here.
2. Built-in GPS. Even without GPS, Google Maps is a fantastic application. But it really shines with GPS. With quality maps and search available globally for a mobile phone, a GPS receiver is a serious option to consider. Will help with navigating to the nearest Sushi bar in Barcelona or to Strawberry Fields in the Central Park.
3. Good, iTunes - compatible, music player. Some time ago I decided to use iTunes library as a foundation for all my music. It started with an iPod (obviously), the I developed a multi-room audio system based on the Infrant / Netgear ReadyNAS running Slimserver that in turn powers a number of Logitech's Squeezeboxes. Unfortunately I have not found an easy way to synchronize my music (that is managed by iTunes) with the Windows phone, so I am still carrying an iPod Nano with me... Converging the Nano with a phone would be welcome...

Last week I managed to put my hands on the Nokia E71. It is almost a perfect device. First, the build quality shines (pun intended), the stainless steel gives that feeling of confidence. Second, the QWERTY keyboard is very good. Very easy to get used to, much better than my current i600. The layout is very good as well. All the necessary @ and // are well exposed. Entering national characters works very well too, finally the support for Polish language seems to be working without a glitch. The display is very good too. Perfectly readable even in a full sunlight. GPS works flawlessly too - I even did not bother to find the supplied Nokia application - went straight to http://m.google.com and downloaded the Nokia - compatible client application. It connected to the GPS immediately and showed both my position on the map and a satellite view of the area. Then I went to the email application. Nokia has something called Nokia Mail for Exchange. It is based on the licensed Activesync protocol. Installation was easy and in three minutes I had the E71 fully in synch with my Exchange Inbox, Calendar and Contacts (all 793 of them). Push email started working immediately as well. So I went to the final test - secure email. I transferred my personal certificate to the Micro SD card in form of a PFX file. Clicking it within the file explorer application installed the certificate on the phone. So far so good... Even too good to be true... but the email test failed. Encrypted email in the Inbox just showed as a subject line and a S/MIME encrypted attachment instead of decrypted body. I played with this for two hours trying different Google queries and different settings. No luck. It just seems the current implementation of Nokia Mail for Exchange does not handle secure encrypted emails. Bad... I am not 100% sure about this, as I have found neither "Yes the E71 does support S/MIME" nor "Sorry, the current version of E71 does not support S/MIME" statement... But so far this seems to be a big con balancing the impressive number of pros related to the Nokia E71.

Next up to the test will be the iPhone 3G. I know it will handle iTunes music better than Nokia :). There are two questions remaining: does iPhone support S/MIME in the Microsoft Exchange scenario and how good (or bad) the virtual keyboard is... There are a number of opinions regarding the latter. Some people say it is fine, some hate it. The E71 with its "real" QWERTY has a big advantage for heavy texters like myself. I guess I will have to judge it myself...