Connectivity
The E61 has everything you can think of at the moment on the connectivity front—the phone is a quad-band GSM phone, so all networks are covered. It’s got GPRS and EDGE connectivity for high-speed internet access and also future-ready with 3G/WCDMA/UMTS support—'Future' ready because India won’t get 3G till late 2008.
Work connectivity is covered in the form of WiFi, Bluetooth, Infrared. While WiFi is the faster 802.11g variety, Bluetooth is still stuck at v1.2, without any support for stereo A2DP, which would have been a nice addition in this otherwise fully equipped phone.
The Infrared port is in a very unusual place – right next to the Pop port on the bottom of the phone, which means you’ll have to turn the phone around if you want to beam anything to another phone or device.
USB also has some issues—it’s the slower 1.1 which makes it a bit of a pain to transfer large files such as music and videos. On top of that, there’s no standard mini-USB slot like the BlackBerry or most Pocket PC phones, so you’ll need to buy and carry around the proprietory cable.
The phone also ships with Sip VoIP calling support and Push-To-Talk.
Memory and Expansion
The E61 comes with around 64MB on-board memory, out of which a little above 40mb is available for use. Not a lot of memory, but that isn’t a problem because there’s has a miniSD card slot for expansion. The miniSD slot in the E61 is hot-swappable, but it’s hidden away next to the battery and requires removal of the battery cover to swap. This doesn’t seem too much of a problem—it’s actually a little more secure than having it right outside—but it does add a bit of inconvenience whenever there’s a memory card swap necessary.



