Last June I bought a Nokia E61 smartphone. For more than three years my old rugged Nokia 5210 served me well and offered the basics I expect from a phone: calling, messaging and synchronizing contacts with a PC-based address book. My increasingly busy life pushed me, however, to look for something more. Synchronizing my work and private agenda is now a necessity, along with handling a richer address book, taking notes, accessing and managing fifty or so passwords and traveling with a core set of documents and spreadsheets.

My ideal phone would support the above features, provide today’s basic connectivity (tri-band GSM, Wi-Fi, bluetooth and hi-speed USB), support large storage options (2GB up memory cards to double as USB storage) and fit comfortably in your jeans pocket. Additionally, if it could handle at the same time two active SIM cards (as some of the latest Chinese phones) in order to travel with a unique handset (instead of one for work and one for personal use) it would even exceed my expectations. Unfortunately, as I soon discovered, mobile phones producers do not offer yet all these features conveniently packaged in a medium-priced product: either you get only some of them (hidden behind many other perfectly useless features) or you get the top range, top priced, full-featured “PC substitutes”. The Nokia E61, however, comes very close to my needs and, since the launch of the new E61i, prices are at an all-time low.

I won’t bother you with a review of the hundreds of features and functions it has (just search for one of the many websites dedicated to Nokia E-series phones or even specifically to the E61). Instead, I’ll share with you some of the settings and specialized software I customized the handset with.

The first step was choosing a nice theme for the interface (I know, it’s foolish to think first about the looks, but I guess it’s what 90% of new phone owners do). Following some great advice from a friend, I headed to www.e-series.org and browsed through their carefully selected “friday themes”. If you’re having problems installing any of the themes check the security settings on the phone as suggested in one of the site’s articles. Just for the records, I finally had a go with the “GreenAttemptDefaultByP@sco” theme…

Step two was installing a few additional Symbian and J2ME applications to cover my basic needs (all free or open source obviously!). Apart from the very good Adobe Reader provided with the phone (although on a separate CD), I installed right away Autolock to automatically lock the keyboard after a custom delay (a standard function on all mobile phones except, incredibly, on the E61). Then, for messaging, I downloaded Google’s GMail Mobile client (which speeds up significantly the access to your Inbox compared to the plain mobile web interface) and the excellent Fring (a multi-standard messenger and voice client still in beta). Also, I installed cCalcPro as calculator and the feature-rich MGMaps able to browse a large number of mapping engines and databases. Finally, I started a quest for the best password manager. After visiting many many websites I settled unconvincingly on jWallet (http://sire.estig.ipb.pt/jWallet/), a simple J2ME application with basic features and light encryption algorithms. Yesterday, however, I discovered that an unofficial KeePass (http://keepass.info/) J2ME port has just been released: it looks very promising and hopefully it will sync with the excellent PC-based desktop version. To find and download all these programs search them on Google since they are available from multiple repositories over the Net.

The last step, still in progress, is achieving the perfect synchronization between all my address books (mission impossible!). If I succeed, I’ll have my GMail’s contacts, Lotus Notes’ address book and iPod contacts all seamlessly aligned. I’m currently working on a Lotus Notes agent to import GMail’s contacts into Notes’ address book which then syncs via Nokia’s PC Suite with the E61. A vCard export from Notes’ address book then updates my iPod. More on this in a future post…