In the end, and after my much deliberation, I went for the Nokia E61i as my new phone. I always liked the Nokia E61 which was my main phone for most of last year and once you’ve got over the form factor well the E61i is a natural upgrade path. I did ponder over the iPhone, but �269 is just a little too much as an inital payment, when I can get better hardware for “free”. Oh but the UI is so sweet. A colleague got me interested in the Samsung F700, but thankfully I didn’t since the same colleague took the phone back after a few days, as it was pretty deficient in several ways (such as poor PC synchronisation, bad use of the big screen and poor support from Samsung). Maybe Samsung’s software issues will go away when they start building on top of the Android platform. This is not too far in distance since Android is leaving the virtual world and becoming a reality as EU Edge demonstrate with a deployment of Android on a Sharp Zaurus SL-C760. The $10million purse for the best mobile apps should also help things along. I’ll find out more at Google’s Android day in London this Thursday.

So why the the Nokia E61i then?

The Wifi support is great. I would love to see better wifi hoping functionality, such as utilising the access point groups to define my preferred access points in order and better support across all the apps. I seem to spend a bit of time in each app switching between access points, but at least connection is pretty solid once set up. Wifi usage does help reduce my Vodafone data usage which is capped at a less than attractive 120Mb per month.

With the E61i, the synchronisation of email, contacts and calendaring is pretty seamless. I’ve got it hooked up to our Zimbra server using the Nokia’s Mail for Exchange client (which you can clearly use for Exchange if you have that). I went for syncing my contacts via my mac with iSync because (i) I was playing around with iSync at the time and (ii) it lets me sync my contacts without an internet connection (e.g. when I’m travelling abroad). You’ll need to download the iSync plugin for the E61i since it isn’t provided by default. With the E61i I really can have my email, contacts and calendaring kept in sync between my phone, mac and zimbra effortlessly.

The E61i has also thrown in a camera which is a nice addition over the E61. Don’t expect too much from the camera, but it’s enough for my purposes which are general taking photos of whiteboards and quick photos on business trips to send back to my wife.

The UI is intuitive and quick – the ability to configure the shortcut buttons allows me to get to what I want to quickly. The screen and keyboard are fantastic – I can easily read my inbox and write messages whilst in queues and on the move. Of course the mobile browsing can pretty much read anything out there and do a reasonable job on it, whether I’m using the default browser or opera mini.

So all in all a pretty handy device whilst I’m out and about (or even at home but don’t want to flip out my computer to read my mails). And with a bluetooth headset I don’t have to put the brick that it is to my ear.