While both phones were heavily leaked, today Nokia took the wraps off of two new Symbian-powered smartphones, the E6 and the X7. The E6 is targeted at the business bunch and sports a full QWERTY keyboard, a 2.46-inch 640 x 480 pixel touchscreen display, an 8-megapixel camera, GPS, 802.11n Wi-Fi, and a 1,500mAh battery. The X7 is no doubt the sexier of the two phones. It rocks a 4-inch 640 x 360 resolution AMOLED screen, is made of stainless steel and glass, has 8GB of storage, and offers an 8-megapixel camera capable of recording 720p HD video. The E6 and the X7 will both run Nokia’s updated Symbian “Anna” operating system which Nokia says offers a revamped user interface, new icons, improved text input, faster web browsing, and a new Ovi Maps application that includes public transportation and offers better search. Anna will also provide enterprise grade security with hardware accelerated encryption, and several new e-mail features. Both phones are scheduled to launch during the second quarter of this year; pricing information has not been divulged. If you’re looking for the X7 stateside, don’t hold your breath. AT&T has reportedly already killed its plans to launch the X7. Hit the jump for the full release.

Nokia E6 extends business mobility range and Nokia X7 introduces a new entertainment device for mobile gamers, both using the latest update of Symbian software

Espoo, Finland – Nokia today announced the Nokia E6 and the Nokia X7, two new smartphones aimed at business people and entertainment enthusiasts respectively. The two devices are the first Nokia smartphones to contain the updated Symbian software, with new icons and usability enhancements such as improved text input, a faster browser and refreshed Ovi Maps.

“We are further strengthening Nokia’s smartphone portfolio with these two new devices, both of which offer a more beautiful and intuitive user experience that will soon also be available for the Nokia N8, Nokia E7, Nokia C7 and Nokia C6-01,” said Jo Harlow, head of Nokia’s Smart Devices business. “With these new products and more Symbian devices and user enhancements coming in the near future, we are confident we can keep existing Nokia smartphone customers engaged, as well as attract new first-time and competitor smartphone users.”

Following on from Nokia’s highly successful Nokia E71 and Nokia E72 devices, the Nokia E6 is a sleek business smartphone with a full QWERTY keypad and a high resolution touch display. Designed using premium materials such as glass and stainless steel, the device comes in a compact size that makes it easy to use with either one hand or two. The Nokia E6 offers exceptional battery life and the best out-of-the-box Microsoft messaging experience on a business smartphone, including access to Microsoft Exchange, Microsoft Communicator Mobile and Microsoft SharePoint.

The Nokia X7 is an entertainment-focused smartphone with a large 4″ display ideal for gaming, and an 8 Megapixel camera for capturing pictures and HD-quality video. A distinctively designed device, the Nokia X7 is made from a combination of seamless stainless steel and glass – delivering a solid and durable feel in the hand. The Nokia X7 comes preloaded with the popular Galaxy on Fire HD and Asphalt 5 HD games.

The Nokia E6 and Nokia X7 are also the first smartphones to contain the complete update of the Symbian software user experience. This update offers a host of usability enhancements, including fresh, new icons, improved text input, a faster internet browsing experience and a refreshed Ovi Maps application with improved search and new public transport routes. The renewed software also offers a strong set of new features aimed at business users in particular, including true enterprise grade security with hardware accelerated encryption, and new e-mail features such as full meeting request support.

In coming months the software update, which is nick-named Symbian Anna, will also be available as standard on newly shipping Nokia N8, Nokia E7, Nokia C7 and Nokia C6-01 devices, as well as available to download on previously purchased models of those same smartphones.

For developers, Symbian Anna greatly enhances the user experience on Nokia smartphones and makes the Qt business opportunity with Nokia even greater. Read more at: http://blogs.forum.nokia.com/blog/nokia-developer-news/

For more details on the Nokia X7 and Nokia E6, please visit: http://events.nokia.com/discover-symbian

Last August, Microsoft and Nokia teamed up to bring Microsoft Office functionality to Nokia’s smartphone lineup. The first fruits of this joint venture have come in the form of the newly announced Microsoft Communicator Mobile. Just as the name implies, Communicator Mobile will improve the peer-to-peer communication within Nokia’s Symbian-powered handsets by allowing users to view a colleague’s current status, check their availability on a certain date, and launch an IM session, send a text, or write an email from within the contact card. The mobile communications client will be available initially from the Ovi Store for Nokia’s E71 and E72 handsets, while future E-Series handsets will ship with Communicator Mobile pre-installed.

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There’s nothing worse than being in the middle of a phone call and having your handset die on you. Or perhaps checking your work email on a long trip and having the juice run dry. This morning, Nokia broke out another Eseries device that will reportedly solve all your battery woes. The E52 boasts an impressive 8 hours of talk time and 23 days of standby. Devices like this typically offer a basic feature set but the E52 doesn’t hold back – it packs A-GPS, HSDPA/HSUPA, 3.2 megapixel camera, Mobile VPN and Exchange and Lotus Notes support. The device certainly does a hell of a lot more than refuse to die. The Nokia E52 ships later this year with a 1GB memory card and will set you back €245 (~ $326).

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The Nokia E63 made a surprise public debut at the Symbian smartphone show last week. Labeled Exx in the photos, the E63 gets snagged next to the E71. Looking very much like its older brother, the E63 sports a black coat of paint, instead of the red we previously saw, and a condensed keyboard that fits 8 keys and a mini space bar across the bottom. With such a polished looking production model hitting the scene, a formal announcement should be right around the corner. Hit the jump for a close up picture.

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Sony has just let the cat out of the bag and unveiled its latest Portable Audio Player lines dubbed B-Series, E-Series and S-Series. From bottom to top Sony has focused on functionality, form and affordability with its new portable players and we can’t say it failed in any of the aforementioned categories. That said, what about storage fellas? Sony’s new players top out at 8 GB which, for many, just doesn’t cut it these days. For users willing to sacrifice storage space for versatility and style however, these puppies may be right up your alley. The high end S-Series line touts features like active noise cancellation, Sony’s SensMe Channels and up to 40 hours of playback while the low end B-Series includes FM radio and a low entry price of $45. What about the B-Series? Well, no one talks about the middle child. From the press release:

The S-series of Walkman noise canceling video MP3 players come in two different storage capacities in black:

• The NWZ-S736F has approximately 4GB of internal storage and will cost about $150.
• The NWZ-S738F has approximately 8GB of internal storage and will cost about $180.

The E-series of Walkman video MP3 players will be available in the following configurations:

• The NWZ-E436F comes in black, red, pink, blue, has approximately 4GB of internal storage and costs about $100.
• The NWZ-E438F comes in black, red, pink, has approximately 8GB of internal storage, and costs about $140.

The B-series of Walkman MP3 players come in two different capacities and four colors:

• The NWZ-B133F player has approximately 1GB of internal storage; comes in black, red and blue and will cost about $45.
• The NWZ-B135F player has approximately 2GB of internal storage; comes in black, red and pink and will cost about $60.

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This actually kind of neat… Nokia has just launched a limited trial run of its new chat client. The aptly named Nokia Chat comes to us by way of Nokia labs, and takes advantage of the built-in GPS found in many recent Nokia handsets to provide your chat buddies with location and proximity information. Sure, it’s a little creepy, but we’re all for adopting and exploiting new technology to its fullest. Assuming you’re using a device equipped with both GPS and Nokia Maps, you’ll be able to broadcast your location for the world to see, as well as pinpoint your buddies on your map application. Sound like fun? Assuming you have a compatible device, (N95 8GB, N95, N82, N81 8GB, N81, N76, E71, E66, E51, 6290, 6120 Classic, and 6110 Navigator) hit the link for more info and get your chat on.

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You’ve been waiting and waiting, but finally, the wait is over. Check out our complete video walkthrough of the Nokia E71. We tried to get everything in including most of your reasonable questions that you left in the comments. As we told you, this thing is speedy and small! We even threw in the iPhone and Curve so you could really a size comparison. Now, who’s running out to buy this thing the first day it’s out?

So there’s this phone called the Nokia E71. It magically showed up on our doorstep yesterday (shout out to FedEx Sameday!) and was begging for us to review it. Well, we’re not going to disappoint you. In fact, there will be no disappointment at all as you’ll see in our review. The Nokia E71 has officially entered the ring, and it’s coming out fighting. Spoiler Alert: we love this phone. Full review is after the break!

Design:

Obviously this is subjective, but this could really be one of the sexiest damn phones we’ve seen in a very long time. We could do without the tacky pattern on the back battery cover, but we’ll let it slide this time. The entire phone is chrome and while it’s definitely a fingerprint magnet (just have your assistant wipe it down for you) it looks really sharp in person. Everything is proportionate and sort of just works well together. The middle select key actually serves as the notification light, too. So when you have a missed event, the border around the middle key will glow white until you cleared the event, or until the expiration time you set for the notification light expires. It’s a nice touch and a creative way to get rid of the annoying older-fashioned status light. Oh yeah…did we mention this thing is thin? Seriously, we don’t know how they did it. Especially with everything that’s packed in here…man, that BlackBerry Bold is just huge compared to this. Everyone is going to have to step it up after this because as of now, we can’t find one single thing Nokia sacrificed to make the device this thin and compact.

Screen:

There’s a 320×240 screen on the E71 and it looks very sharp. It’s not as bright as the N95, but it’s very clear and easy on the eyes. Screen real estate isn’t a problem at all as we find it more pleasurable to use than an N95. Pictures and video look very detailed and clean. There’s a decent amount of contrast when looking at media, and you’ll especially appreciate the screen during some heavy web browsing.

Connectivity:

The world must be changing. Remember when Nokia would hold every single feature above your head and never give you the perfect phone? Well, we’re finally getting past that. We’re not positive if there’s support for the 2100MHz band here, so for now, we’ll assume it doesn’t have it and there will be a US NAM model, and European model. In terms of the hard connectivity specs, you’ve got a quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE phone with 850MHz/1900MHz UMTS/HSDPA support, Wi-Fi 802.11 a,b,g, Bluetooth 2.0, and GPS. Like most recent Nokia’s, the GPS is assisted by the network, but fret not because there still is a physical GPS chip in here.

Sound:

Like the E61 and E61i before it, the E71 houses a single speaker in the upper left of the phone. It seems louder than the E61 and it’s pretty clear for ringtones and alert sounds. Music sounds fine on it, but it’s not perfect. Bass is seriously lacking and you do get a “tinny” sort of sound. It is very, very loud, though, so you can be sure that alarm is going to get your ass out of bed in the morning.

Email:

What good would an E-Series device be without email? Besides the normal POP3/IMAP supported protocols, Nokia’s Mail For Exchange comes with the device out of the box and is incredibly easy to setup. The handset supports BlackBerry Connect (though we didn’t actually try it) and we’d imagine Goodlink as well. The messaging application had a little bit of a visual makeover, and it’s for the better. Text is extremely readable and emails look great. We’d have loved to see support for HTML email, but oh well.

Keyboard:

If there had to be one negative to the E71 (relax, it’s not the end of the world) it’s going to be the keyboard. Again, not a huge deal, but if we had to pick one thing to single out it’s the keyboard and it quite possibly won’t bother you. It did annoy us, though. Think of the physical keys on the E71 the same as the E61, just a lot smaller. They’re also not as squishy which is nice, and they’re pretty easy to press once you get it down. Our issue is, again, Nokia has not learned the basic keyboard layout and we personally can’t stand it. On a normal QWERTY keyboard the letter “z” is not directly under the letter “a”. It’s either under the letter “s” or somewhere in between the two. This makes typing a royal bitch if you’re not looking directly at the keyboard and is totally unnecessary. All they had to do is stick the damn period key in front of the “z” key and all would be well. Again, this might not be a big deal to you if you’re coming from a QWERTY E-Series already, but for us hardcore freaks who bang away constantly on the keyboard, we’d like the normal layout that’s used on basically every other QWERTY phone on the planet. Fix it please, Nokia. The keys have a nice white backlighting which makes them very easy to read. Just like the other models, the actual keys don’t light up, just the letters and symbols which makes for a very clean and sexy look.

Something also interesting is the inclusion of predictive text on here. You might be thinking why you’d ever need predictive text when you’ve got a QWERTY keyboard, but it actually helps more than it gets in the way. It sort of works like how the iPhone does. If you’re typing fast and accidentally misspell a word but keep typing and hit the space bar, it will auto correct and suggest that word for you. It can also save you a good amount of typing time as it will suggest words for you when you are halfway through them and a simple press of the space bar selects the suggested word and keeps you moving.

Expandability:

There’s a microSD card slot right above the microUSB port on the handset, so you should be able to expand the memory of the phone to the largest microSD card you can find. We haven’t checked data transfer speeds to the memory card over USB yet, but we’re assuming it’s on par with the rest of the Nokias.

Call quality:

Nokia and call quality go together like ham and burger. Kool-Aid and sugar. The E71 doesn’t disappoint. We’ve had such a pleasurable experience with it that we’ve been calling people randomly just to talk on the phone. In all seriousness, it meets or exceeds what we’ve come to expect and love from Nokia. A phone that excels as a phone, as it should. It actually went toe-to-toe with our BlackBerry Curve in terms of holding onto a signal in low coverage areas. And all you BlackBerry lovers out there know that RIM makes one hell of a cell radio in those things.

Battery:

There’s a 1500mAh battery in the E71, and with a full day of heavy use like constant email, phone calls, web browsing, and all around messing with the phone, we’ve still got around 2 bars left. There should be no concern with the battery life here.

Conclusion:

We’re at the end of the review, but by now, you’ve seen how impressed we are with the phone. It takes a lot to get us excited but the E71 has done it. This thing, in our opinion, is the best phone Nokia has made to date. That’s a very bold statement, we know. But this really is going to be the phone to beat by a lot of manufacturers. From the design, to the specs, to the size, the feel — it has the entire package. It’s not for everyone, though. Some people prefer a straight up phone like a flip phone, but in terms of a smartphone with a QWERTY keyboard, this takes the cake. It is just striking compared to the shit device the E61 was. It’s ok, we still love y’all that carry the E61, but this puts it to shame. One thing I personally can’t get over is the awesome dimensions of the device. It’s so perfectly thin, yet incredibly comfortable to hold and use. We just hope Nokia doesn’t wait too long to bring this to market as they need to strike now. Like right now. This second. After seeing all of the detailed shots and our impressions, how do you guys feel about the phone? Are you foaming at the mouth waiting for it or ice-grillin’ us?

It’s my first day back but that’s not stopping us from bringing you guys a little hardcore Nokia action! We’ve got a Nokia E71 in hand and we’ve got to say, this thing is nice. It’s the perfect size — a cross between the Nokia E51 and E61 — and it’s built like a tank. Did we mention that it has US 3G bands? Oh, ok then. The keyboard is going to take some getting used to, but it’s worlds better than the old E61 and E61i. Also, this bad beast of an Eseries is thin, and thin is in folks. It is noticeably thinner than the reigning thin smart phone champ, the iPhone. All in all, we can’t seem to put this thing down. Our resident S60 nut Zach confirmed to us that the E71 will definitely be launching with the US 3G bands, so we’re just going to have to do a little bit of waiting game to see when this is finally released. In terms of specs, the E71 we have is a quad-band GSM EDGE phone with 850MHz/1900MHz UMTS/HSDPA. It’s rocking a 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera, Wi-Fi and GPS. We’re putting our full review together and we’re doing a video walkthrough but in the meantime, hang tight and hit the gallery. We’ve got some shots of the E71 with the N95 8GB and iPhone so you can really see the size of the thing.

Click on over to our Nokia E71 hands on gallery!