I just received my E71-2 from Amazon today. Finally gave in and got the phone after going back and forth between N95-4, AT&T HTC Fuze, and couple of others (I have Blackberry Bold as a work phone). Needed to replace my aging and dying Nokia E71 (which I started using after my previous phone died) and after playing with N85 in Nokia store, decided that QWERTY is a good thing.
So, received the device today and promptly installed bunch of various apps (joikuspot, jbaktaskman, conversations, newer maps, mail for exchange, etc...). Everything seems to work fine, I am digging the dual-mode setup, Nokia PC Suite has been tremendously improved, I am connecting to my Exchange setup with no issues. Even played around with data connections from my laptop and that worked as well.
So far so good. Build is very solid and battery life seems to be good. I am very pleasantly surprised by this phone (had all kinds of issues with E70 and Nokia support in particular), and hopefully Nokia NAM support improved as well. Anyway, there are some downsides, messaging client still sucks, camera seems mediocre, and screen could be a bit bigger with higher resolution (then again, we'd have Bold-sized device). However, between the size, functionality, build and decent pricing, E71 is a great little device.
For pure Email, Bold is still better. However, Bold web browser still sucks and the device is kind of big.