An enterprising trio

The first thing you should know is that you don’t need an “enterprise” phone to check your office e-mail. Really. If your office has a push-e-mail system in place, you can get your e-mail on virtually any high-end mobile device if you install a piece of software.

HTC Touch Diamond (+) Great looks, nice interface (-) Not the iPhone and typing is a problem Rs 27,500 (Airtel exclusive)

However, most enterprise devices are so called because of the business applications on them. They also have a load of other interesting applications.

That said, the three devices featured here are all quite different. Let us start with the ASUS P320. The most important thing about this device is that it is cheap. It is also small, which makes it likely that you might lose it. Worse still, it makes typing extremely irritating on the rather petite screen. That said, setting up your e-mail and synchronising your PC to the P320 is very easy.

ASUS claims that it has kept the price of the device so low because it wants to get in a whole new class of consumers to experience “smart” enterprise devices.

That’s also why it has the device available in pink. Surprisingly, the battery isn’t that bad and performance, too, is not bad for its size. But on the performance front, the HTC Touch Diamond, which also runs Windows Mobile 6 like its Taiwanese sibling, is a class apart.

HTC’s “Touch-Flo” interface first experienced on the Touch is still rather neat (but faster than before), but this phone is about more than performance.

The plastic rear cover of the device is given a “diamond cut” look, which reminds one of the radar-beating shape of the United States’ F-117 Stealth Fighter.

ASUS P320 (+) Extremely Affordable (-) Small form factor makes it irritating to use Rs 12,900

We genuinely liked the Touch Diamond, but almost everyone who saw the device asked the same question: “How does it compare to the iPhone?” Well, honestly, we have not seen the 3G iPhone as yet, with its promised improvements in e-mail connectivity.

But based on the last iPhone, typing is easier on the Apple device, as is storage, though e-mail synchronisation, we guess, would still be better on the HTC. So maybe, the Touch Diamond for e-mail and the iPhone as a personal device.

The third device in our line-up is the only “non-touch”, non-Taiwanese and non-Windows device here—the Nokia E71—which succeeds the very successful E61i.

Nokia E71 (+) Nice looks, full keyboard (-) No BlackBerry Connect solution Rs 22,949

First things first. Nokia has made the device slimmer and thinner, which makes it possibly the bestlooking full keyboard device available currently, at least until the BlackBerry Bold comes out later this year.

Nokia has stopped BlackBerry Connect support on its devices, which allowed the BlackBerry solution to work on Nokia handsets.

That said, configuring e-mail support on the Symbian system has been made a lot easier, and if you have a web-based e-mail solution, it is brilliant. We set up our Gmail inbox onto the E71 in about two minutes. It’s one device that can handle both official and personal inboxes easily.

Finally, which one of these three would we have? This writer has never been a fan of Windows Mobile-based devices, even if the HTC Touch is definitely the coolest of the three, and HTC’s modified interface is brilliant.

But somehow our preference for full hard-key keyboards shines through here, so we would take the E71, though don’t ignore the other two because we did.