I love FedEx–they somehow managed to deliver my new Nokia E61 today instead of Monday, so I have the whole weekend to play with it.

A few first impressions:

1. It’s much more solid then it appears on the website. It has a metal case, and everything about it feels well-made.
2. The screen is wonderful. It’s big, bright, and easy to read. While doesn’t have as many pixels as some of the other models in Nokia’s latest lineup, I have nothing to complain about. The text fonts for the browser and office apps are small enough that it’ll fit a lot of text on the screen.
3. It seems to work fine with Asterisk. I was able to make and receive a few VoIP phone calls over WiFi without any problems.
4. The built-in web browser works well enough. I was able to check gmail and look up a few directions without a problem. Strangely, the only site that hasn’t worked for me is http://www.google.com. I think Google’s trying to feed the phone a WAP page or something, while the phone is expecting HTML. It shouldn’t be hard to fix.
5. Google Maps for Mobile phones works great. That’s half of the reason that I wanted a new phone :-).
6. The audio quality is better then my old T616.
7. The keyboard is good. I’m not used to the layout yet, and it’s weird having to hit a shift key to get numbers, but it’s better then Graffiti.
8. I’ve had some weird problems when copying large files using the USB cable. For some reason, the transfer locks up from time to time. Unplugging the cable solves the problem without rebooting either end, but it’s annoying. I should probably find a USB-to-SD adapter; it’ll be faster.

I’ll post more later, once I’ve had a chance to really break it in.