Nokia has made its E71 smartphone available to North American consumers, in the company’s latest attempt to successfully crack into the smartphone market outside of Europe. Retailing at an unsubsidized price of around $500. Being touted as the world’s slimmest QWERTY smartphone which is measuring only 10 millimeters (0.39 inches), the Nokia E71 boasts features that make it worthy of the Nokia E-series branding. The highlights of E71 include a full QWERTY keyboard, quad-band GSM and dual-band HSDPA connectivity (850 / 1900 MHz for the US version), Wi-Fi, built-in GPS, Nokia Maps, a QVGA TFT display with 16 million colors, full HTML browser, advanced email capabilities, Push to Talk, Office applications, a 3.2 Megapixel camera with auto focus, flash and video recording, Music and Video players, FM radio and Symbian 9.2 S60 3rd Edition. In anticipation of competing with RIM in North America, Nokia has dropped the BlackBerry Connect application from the E71. This allowed Nokia phone users to access corporate e-mail systems that used the BlackBerry service. Nokia says it wants to push users toward more open e-mail systems, rather than the closed solutions offered by providers like RIM. For the moment, only the dark grey version of the E71 is available in the States, the white one coming later this year
