I broke down last week and bought a PDA phone. I've been eyeing the blackberries, Treos, and other PDA phones with little interest for quite some time, but when I laid my eyes on the Nokia E61, I couldn't resist. It has all the typical features you'd come to expect from such a device. Always-on email alerts, QWERTY keypad, web browser, mobile office suite, etc. But the E61 sets it's self apart from the pack with three features that have become a necessity in any enterprise class mobile productivity device. WiFi, VoIP, and GPS.

There are a few phones on the market touting such features but nobody has nailed it quite as well as nokia. They are both deeply integrated in this device to the point that I can hardly tell when I'm using WiFi, or Edge. The VoIP works so well that I've made it my default calling method.

The GPS capabilities on their own, are not much of an offering, the phone it's self does not even offer a GPS receiver, though it integrates nicely with the bluetooth receiver it purchased for my Palm Lifedrive. One of the first things I did after purchasing the E61 was to download google maps mobile. They did an excellent job on the interface, alas, no GPS support (which would improve the utility one thousand percent). I stumbled across J2meMap and it's the perfect blend of GPS, online maps, etc. It's still in beta and it's obvious, I had a number of stability problems with this application but it shows a ton of promise. The only thing missing is a netstumbler mode.

Another necessary application for any network admin is SSH. I found a Symbian version of Putty which is a great open source SSH client. The font sizes and colors are user configurable and overall, I found with the built in QWERTY keypad, this application rated fairly high on the usability scale for me which I think is the single most challenging factor with mobile applications.

Overall, in the last week, the phone has improved my offsite workflow immensely by notifying me when important email comes in, allowing me to place and receive calls as if I was sitting in my office (over VoIP), giving me remote access to servers over SSH, and even proved useful in finding my way to a very remote lake on Mt Hood after getting lost using an outdated map (thanks to GPS and a weak but usable GPRS connection to download the updated map from google).

This wouldn't be a review without the obligatory list of pros and cons, so I'll close on that note.

The Pros:

The Cons: