Bye-Bye E62, We Hardly Knew You

AT&T is sending the E62 out to the smartphone retirement village. That's right, the smartphone that was destined to kill the BlackBerry is now nothing more than a memory in the minds of mobile geeks and abandoned enterprise users. What happened?Alas, like so many high-tech flops, the Nokia E62 was born of compromise. The device's parent, the E61, sports built-in Wi-Fi access. But when Nokia tried to bring the E61 to the U.S., the carriers weren't quite ready for that. So Nokia stripped out the Wi-Fi and released what many mobile geeks considered an inferior device.

Nokia tried to push the E62 as the BlackBerry killer for the U.S. market, but rival smartphones, like the BlackBerry Pearl and Motorola Q, caught on with users while the E62, well, didn't.

The E61, however, has a small but devoted cult of users here in the U.S. Some insiders think the E61 could succeed as an unlocked device in the U.S. market where the E62 failed, especially as many business users look for a smartphone with usable Wi-Fi. In fact, Dell is now selling the unlocked version of the E61 on its site.

So who knows, maybe the E61 will be a hit with U.S. consumers and make up for the flop of the E62. What do you think? Are any of you dedicated E61 users?