Nokia E71 vs HTC Dream

Recently, I purchased a HTC Dream and I just cannot believe how dumb my new smartphone is. I really wonder if it even deserves its name as a smartphone, coolphone probably, but smartphone is really a far stretch. I am not writing this review as a professional techie or something like that, but just as a normal user who wants my phone to be just that much smarter and helps me with my work easier. I write with my 1 year of experience with using Nokia E71 and 2 weeks of experience with my HTC Dream, or maybe I should call it HTC Nightmare.

To be fair, HTC Dream is a pretty cool phone, having both touchscreen features and QWERTY keypad, but the sliding gets a bit irritating at times. Before I bought the phone, I thought that I would have a touchscreen keypad if I wanted to, so that I need not slide in or out if I’m just typing a couple of letters. Nevertheless, I think the touchscreen and QWERTY combination is pretty helpful, since zooming and scrolling is far easier with touchscreen.

HTC Dream also loses out a bit in its bulkiness, being about twice the thickness of Nokia E71. However, I’m not a guy that goes for aesthetics and so on. I really just want useful and practical features and here’s the major source of my frustration. There are a couple of features that I hold so dear in Nokia E71 that is either non-existent on HTC Dream or I just can’t find it anywhere. I have spent two weeks trying to figure out my HTC Dream and still have not found solutions for those features that I want, while I got those features in a day with Nokia E71, which I think is much more user-friendly.

Firstly, HTC Dream does not have default software that supports reading of PDF documents, which is one of the main reasons why I got a smartphone. In fact, with HTC Dream, we need to specially install software just to be able to browse files on our memory card and I find that extremely lame. Till now, I’m still stuck at finding a PDF reader that works on HTC Dream, cause the ones I have found at the marketplace all does not work and turns up some error when I try to use them.

Secondly, Nokia E71 is smart enough to allow automatic SMS response if I do not pick up phone calls, but HTC Dream does not offer that. Nokia E71 also offers profile, while HTC Dream does not. In fact, I have not been successful at putting my phone on silent vibration only mode, because when HTC Dream is silent, it turns off vibration as well. The only way I manage to do it is to switch the sound to the lowest, so that it will vibrate and thankfully, the sound is soft enough to be like silent.

Nokia E71 also has a neater and easier to view calendar, but this may be subjective. Notes is also a useful feature in Nokia E71. One thing I like about HTC Dream over Nokia E71 is the trackball. I think it is easier to use compared to the direction buttons equilvalent, but this may be subjective also. HTC Dream’s games also seem to be more fun, but honestly, I didn’t buy my smartphone for games. I still wish I can read my ebooks on the way to work, but I’m stuck with playing games until I figure out how.

In fact, I’m just so pissed with my HTC Dream cause it cannot read PDF documents by default that I’m posting this. Nokia E71 may not be the best phone, but I really love the fact that it does exactly what I need to do with a phone and it’s so easy to start using it. HTC Dream is definitely not giving me good dreams…