We are big fans of the Nokia E71 here, but appreciate not everyone can afford to commit to an 18 month contract, or don’t want to pay over £250 for the device without a long term contract.  Well, the E71’s brother, the Nokia E63 maybe the answer, and at only £150 from Virgin (on PAYG), it’s even affordable for everyone.

Now, the Nokia E63 has to lose some features to justify the price difference, and the device does feel “cheaper” alongside an E71, but still stands on its own as a decent phone.  The main loss is the GPS (All Nokia E-Series devices feature Wi-Fi, and hence the GPS functionality was dropped), but with Google Maps, which can use mobile network cell ID (and Wi-Fi) to help locate you, and will generally provide you with a good overall position.  The other difference is the camera is only 2 megapixels, compared to the 3.2 of the E71 (and with the latest E71 firmware improving that camera this maybe another reason to prefer the E71). To counteract this, the E63 has a few extra keys near the spacebar providing handy access to some frequently used symbols, although the E63 does lose the volume control keys on the side of the device.

Which would we go for? We would spend the extra for the GPS and better camera, but the Nokia E63 shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand, and at £150 is quite a bargain.

Thanks to Gerry at nokiAAdict.com for pointing out this price to us.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 20th, 2009 at 2:57 pm and is filed under Gadgets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.