I’ve been pretty tough on the Nokia lately, but I’ve found some things that I really appreciate. I felt I owed it to those perky Finns to enumerate these things.

Mail for Exchange. I found Mail for Exchange on the Nokia website, and while it took a few minutes to get configured, it works flawlessly. Certainly an easier process than setting up Blackberry Connect, which I still can’t get to work. It synchronizes my calendar and email directly through our corporate Outlook server. Before, I had to sync with my laptop through a USB cable; now I don’t need anything but GPRS service. Some (but not all) of my gripes about Symbian’s email support is rescinded. I still think their POP3 client (used for Gmail) bites the big one.

Voice dialing. On my Cingular 2125, this involved manually setting a “voice tag” for each contact on my list. It was tedious, and I didn’t do it. The Nokia has synthesized a voice tag for everyone on my list, and all I have to do is speak. It’s very accurate, even with names like “Glyph Lefkowitz“. This almost makes up for the fact that the Nokia lacks predictive contact searching, and won’t share the address book with my Garmin GPS.

Fold-out keyboard. It’s part of the design, so it seems silly to mention it, but the keyboard really is great. The right kind of tactile feel, perfect key sizes, and punctuation characters deftly laid out. If I do send this phone back and get the HTC S710 instead, I know that the keyboard will feel like a downgrade.

Web browser. Nokia’s definitely wins over IE Mobile in the browser competition. I don’t know what it’s like on WM6, but on WM5, it doesn’t support frames (no Outlook Web Access) and frequently chokes when rendering large pages. The Nokia browser renders cleanly, shows you images of sites in the history, and lets you zoom out for quickly navigating large pages.

As I’m getting more familiar with the phone, I’m liking it more. It’s also getting slower, though, so I suspect I’m going to need to uninstall some cruft sooner or later.