I traded in my RAZR V3 and got the Nokia E61 this week. The E61 is heavily promoted by Orange and I couldn’t resist the QWERTY keyboard.

The bottom line is that I love it! I loved the RAZR as well, but the V3 fat boy wasn’t really it, and the Q is not a GSM phone. The E61 is the first REAL smart phone I see from Nokia. The previous Symbian based ones were featured phones, not smart phones. The E61 is WiFi enabled (huge plus!), has a wide QWERTY keyboard (a must!) and despite it’s size fits rather well into a pocket. Email works like a charm, but the real surprise was the browser! Rich HTML, smart mobile centric navigation, escellent screen resolution. Mobile browsing is actually fun and easy! Way to go!

It seems like the PDA days are over. Smart phones have won the battle and that’s good news for Nokia and bad news for Microsoft. As Russel Buckley summarizes well:

“The last bastion for the PDA is the US, with over 50% of worldwide sales. Maybe, that’s why Microsoft think the battle of Palm v Windows is even vaguely relevant to the big picture. As I wrote over a year ago, it’s like two bald, old men, fighting over a comb. Even Palm seem to have realised this today.

Next target for the mobile is the stand alone MP3 player, about to be consigned to a historical curiosity, as one of the fastest product life cycles - from launch to extinction -ever to be launched.”