I rather like the Nokia E6 which WOMWorld/Nokia lent me. It looks and feels very elegant and the keyboard is one of the best I’ve ever used on phone.

The only real issue I have with the phone is the extremely small fonts used in HTML emails (image below, left) and for some mobile Web sites like CNN (image below, right).

I’ve reduced the images so that they are about the size of the E6’s 2.4 inch screen when displayed on my 22 inch 1920 x 1080 px monitor. Pretty hard to read aren’t they?  On the E6 the text is much sharper thanks to the phone’s very high pixel density but is still difficult to read.

I haven’t found a way to increase the minimum font size in the browser or email app but I’m using something that’s almost as good, Opera Mini and Opera Mobile. The images below are of Opera Mini 6.1 displaying the HTML email using Gmail’s “Basic HTML” version at https://mail.google.com/mail/h/ on the left and the CNN article on the right.  Note the nice easily readable fonts.

The bottom pair of images show the same pages in Opera Mobile 11.1. Opera Mobile features pinch zoom and text reflow after zoom so you can easily adjust the size of the text on any page for optimum readability.

A pleasant surprise I found with both Opera browsers is that all of Opera’s one and two key shortcuts work without having to use the Alt key.  So the 8 (B) key by itself works as page down, 2 (T) is page up, 8 (U) + 0 (M) refreshes the page, etc.  Very handy and much faster than going through the touch menus.