I got an EL71 last December when I changed my mobile contract and my phone. I must admit that the EL71 looked quite attractive and I was tempted by the fact that you could upgrade the phone memory to 2Gb by the insertion of a MicroSD card so I decided to go with it.

In a word? No.

Inside the phone is a different matter. It's NOT 3G compatible so if you're looking for something that is then this is not the phone to go for. The display is quite bright (resolution 240 x 320) and the main screen is quite attractive although I don't get on with the sidebar that it uses. This is intended to make navigation easier and it can be customised, but there is something that annoys me about it. I have a liking for scooting through menus which for some weird reason I can do quicker that I can use this sidebar thing. I think the delay between tabbing down is too long as opposed to me hitting the menu button and a few extra key presses.

It's upgradable to 2Gb (the internal memory is a paltry 16Mb). It uses the MicroSD card format and if you've not seen these you're in for a shock. They are tiny and I mean tiny as in smaller than a postage stamp. These slot into the back of the phone next to the sim card and what you can fit on these can rival an entry level ipod. I've tried to ignore that fact that I like the MP3 format and fought against buying an MP3 player, but eventually relented and then decided that I wanted one in my phone so this helped make the decision for me with this phone. The problem is the phone can't pull it off in the media department.

The same goes with the video function. I encode video a lot of the time so I'm at home with most of the formats and the main format this phone uses is the 3gp format. Given the size of the screen I decided that I could encode some programmes that I watch and have recorded so that I could watch them on the move. I encoded them correctly, dumped them on the card and went on my way. I had either no sound, no picture or a plain old crash! If you want to record video on your phone then keep it short. I used it to record several shots (each around 10 minutes in length) at Chinese new year in Liverpool. On 4 of these it crashed before I managed to save them. The battery (I'll get to that soon) was fully charged and the memory card pretty clear so that annoyed me to say the least.

Battery wise. Well pretty much the same really. It allegedly has 300 hours of standby time and 5 hours talktime. The talktime is pretty accurate and I managed about that (believe me my phones do get hammered), but standby you're looking at around 24 hours or so. Weekends tend to be the days when I chill out and I was having to charge the phone at least once a day. If you let the phone die completely then you get a couple of charges that will last maybe 36 hours, but after that it decreases dramatically.