BenQ-Siemens E71

General release cancelled
31st July 2006

The BenQ-Siemens E71 is one of those phones that requires a second look at the design. At first, it looks a little odd and somewhat ugly (especially from the press photographs on the right). In fact, in real life it's a smooth, elegant looking handset as you can see from the picture below.

First the basics - this is an 80 gram phone with a 240x320 pixel display, 1.3 megapixel camera, microSD memory expansion, Bluetooth, multimedia player and an FM radio. That's a pretty impressive package for such a lightweight handset.. more impressive when you consider that the BenQ-Siemens E71 has a maximum talktime of 6 hours with up to 16 days standby time.

However, one of the things that BenQ-Siemens are proud of with the E71 is the "Dark Silver" handset (on the right) which has a special coating to stop it picking up fingerprints. You may well laugh, but it's one of those things that irritates users of highly-polished handsets and it does show some attention to detail from BenQ-Siemens. The other coulour ("Onyx Black") doesn't come with the coating.

As we said, viewed from an angle, the smooth design of the BenQ-Siemens E71 becomes apparent. To quote their press release, BenQ-Siemens say: "The design idea was inspired by naturally fluid forms and took its cue from the elements: The round, soft design of the BenQ-Siemens E71 was modeled on fluid, floating metal." We say that it's pleasantly curved.

There's a podcast client, RSS news reader, email client and of course a web browser. The BenQ-Siemens E71 also supports 3D games.

It's a tri-band GSM phone, available in GSM 900/1800/1900 or 850/1800/1900 configurations, with GPRS and EDGE support.

On the downside, the BenQ-Siemens E71 doesn't support stereo Bluetooth and we would have preferred to see at least a 2 megapixel camera, but overall it's a very attractive looking handset that packs in a lot of features considering how light it is.

BenQ-Siemens say that the E71 should be available from September 2006 in Europe and Latin America, then November 2006 is Asia.

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