Nokia E71 soon in black and red!

Photo taken by flickr user: sankarimuotoilija and posted in Nokia E71 group pool

When I was checking a photo pool of our flickr group and I have found an interesting photo, the one you can see in this post. It shows original black edition of Nokia E71! I had no idea, that during this month Nokia World Show in Barcelona, our beloved phone was shown in new colors: red and black. I think that is really cool, because black really suits this device. Black E71, marked as E71x will be available in the US from AT&T network. I like the red edition shown by E71blog as well.

I hope they won’t make it pink, like Motorola did in case of V3 RAZR, which was available in every possible color.

Reasonable dealing with data transmission on E71

Two days ago I read a great post at E71fanatics.com blog analyzing how much data the use of A-GPS with Nokia E71 is consuming. Honesty speaking I was thinking about a similar post recently. Some time ago I was also afraid about the amount of data transferred when the phone is communicating with base stations to accelerate fixing my GPS position. As we all now know from the mentioned post, it is not so bad. But what if you don’t have a flat data rate, or you have only a small data package available, like 50 megabytes monthly? If you start A-GPS (for example by using application like Nokia Maps) it will consume less than 10 kilobytes and your phone will finish packet data connection. Nevertheless, you will pay for a whole data billing unit, which could be 50, 100 or even 500 kilobytes, depending on your operator rates. How to avoid it?

The solution is really, really simple. After waking up (YES, I turn off my phone when I sleep, weird isn’t it?) I simply start native Nokia web browser (by long pressing 0 key) and I connect to GPRS/EDGE or 3G data domain using standard GPRS access point (called APN, in my case it is ‘Era Internet’). When I finish morning browsing, I simply hide browser by pressing Home key. What happens? The connection is maintained, but almost no transmission is done, because a web page is already fully loaded. Now let’s imagine you want to check your e-mail account, or use Nokia Maps (which is using A-GPS). When the chosen application starts, it asks you to choose an APN to be used for this software. Now choose the same, which was used for the native browser. What will happen? Data session opened for the browser will be activated, but within the same billing unit. Leave the application, leaving browser still working in a background and voila! You have found a very saving way to use data transmission. My experience shows that doing it in such a way I can check my email several times during a day, plus use A-GPS, browser, or IMs and all those actions could be done without exceeding 500 kilobytes.

Now an obvious question may come to your mind. Does it have impact on battery uptime? The answer is yes, but very moderate. In comparison, this effect is much smaller than in case of push mail application using packet transmission more often. Of course if you use a flat rate it does not make sense to act this way, but for more economic usage of data transmission, Symbian S60 proves to have a really good, helpful connection manager. I’m very curious if you have any other way to save your phone bill?