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A lot of business people carry two mobile phones at all times. The reason? To keep business and personal separate. While there are a number of ways that you can do that on one mobile device, it’s still too easy to get sucked back into work mode when you’re on your personal time. Enter the E71.

The Nokia E71 is a smartphone that lets you perform just about any task you can think of but all from your mobile device. In addition, it offers a unique dual home screen which lets you leave the office in peace by customizing what you want to see in each of your home screens. For example, in my tests I had one home screen pulling my e-mail from Exchange while on the other home screen I had my Gmail account. It’s really a great feature, and one I hope to see on other devices in the future.

Look and Feel
The first thing you’ll notice about the E71 is how big the battery is. It’s actually nicely contained so that the phone itself is still easy to hold and navigate.

What the big battery does, however, is provide excellent battery life, even with 3G connectivity and constant web browsing–something most phones struggle with. There’s also a very comfortable keyboard, with ridged keys where the numbers are. For instant navigation there are four main buttons that bring you to your home screen, calendar, contacts or e-mail and for overall navigation there’s a Navi Key, which also has a light that pulses based on certain notifications.

I should also mention that the OS features a lot of auto-completion and error correction pieces built-in, which make it very easy to navigate the E71 using just one hand. As for the look, you can see in the pictures that it’s a very polished device. It initially screamed corporate to me but when I started playing I immediately saw its consumer appeal.

Features
The Nokia E71 is loaded with features. For starters, you can make calls, but when you dial you don’t actually leave your home screen. Instead, a window pops up over the main screen and shows that you’re making a call. These types of innovations are peppered throughout the E71 and give the overall phone’s interface a web 2.0 feel.

Mail and Exchange
There’s a built-in Mail application, which unfortunately doesn’t perform an auto-complete from your contacts. It does work perfectly with Exchange, though, which can be accessed by installing a free Mail for Exchange application. Speaking of which, it’s one of the best implementations I’ve seen for Exchange. After installing the application and providing the necessary settings, my calendar, contacts, e-mail and tasks came streaming in. I really like the calendar implementation in particular on the E71, especially the way it automatically creates a fake entry in your calendar for the day that shows you how many tasks you have to complete. Clicking on the entry brings up the Tasks application–it’s pretty seamless.

Podcasts and music playback
I didn’t think I was a big podcast fan until I started playing with the E71. Granted, I download a bunch of podcasts on a regular basis on my iPhone but the E71 lets you subscribe to and download podcasts directly from the device, without being tethered. Since I tend not to tether my iPhone because I do over-the-air Exchange syncing, the ability to pull down podcasts untethered led me to listen to some podcasts while sending and receiving e-mail. I also downloaded a video podcast while taking notes for this review. When the download was complete it launched the built-in Real Player–no intervention required.

I also was amazed at how loud the speaker is on the E71. This is one of the first devices that I didn’t have to maximize the volume level on playback to hear the podcast properly–I actually had to listen at almost half of the volume.

The Gmail test
One of the main tests I always perform on a new mobile phone is sending and receiving from Gmail. The E71 was recognized by Gmail and a Java client was downloaded. It’s actually the best implementation I’ve seen, and I found myself wanting the E71 just for that functionality alone. I honestly didn’t know Gmail could work that smoothly on a mobile and it has me very excited to see what Android will offer, since it’s going to be very tightly tied with all of Google’s offerings.

Office, Voice Aid, and more
The Nokia E71 comes loaded with versions of Word, Excel and Powerpoint and you can even compose a Powerpoint deck directly from the mobile phone if you desire. It also features an application called Voice Aid which will read aloud pretty much anything it sees on the screen to you. There’s also a Barcode Reader application, but I couldn’t get it to read any bar codes in my tests, and of course an included camera, GPS and web browser. The browser itself is worth mentioning in that it rendered Google’s iPhone-friendly pages exactly as it does on the iPhone. It was a welcome change being able to navigate iPhone-friendly pages with actual up and down buttons, instead of relying on a touch screen.

One thing I normally don’t comment on with a phone is the ringtones but the combination of loud speaker volume and crisp ringtones forced me to comment. You can also set video ringtones which will play a video when a call comes in.

Multitasking

I mentioned above how I was able to perform other tasks while downloading and listening to podcasts. This multitasking holds true throughout the phone. I also was impressed with how fast I could switch from one application to another and how quickly an application would launch.

In summary, there’s very little that I didn’t like about the E71. It’s definitely one of the more powerful smartphones I’ve used, and once you get used to the Series 60 way of navigating the device (it took me an hour or so), it’s easy to customize and find just about anything you’re looking for. I could easily see the E71 replacing just about any phone I tend to carry.

Read more about the E71 or purchase the U.S. version for $483 unlocked at Nokia.com.