There have been various reviews of the Nokia E61 over the past few months each highlighting various pros and cons. More recently some bloggers have been posting wish-lists of features they’d like to see in a new firmware upgrade or in the next incarnation of the device. However none have talked about something that I noticed when I first used the device.

One of the points that kept being raised in the various reviews was that the E61 would have really profited from a Blackberry style scroll-wheel. Now, the E61 has two keys on it’s left-hand side which are used for Volume control during calls or while playing music. What I noticed, however, is they can *only* be used for volume control and are useless when you’re using the majority of applications on the device. They could easily be useful in a number of applications to scroll through lists or as Page-Up and Page-Down controls in a browser. In fact they’d be just as useful for navigating through the menus if you could use the “voice dial” key as a select button.

I know that the E61 has a joystick in the middle of the device for doing all this but the fact is that the volume keys are really in a great position (the same position as the scroll-wheel on the P910i) and could be used as an extension to the joystick as in the Page-Up/Page-Down scenario. In fact when i was using the browser i found myself instinctively hitting those keys to try and scroll down.

It would be interesting to know whether this is something Nokia can update in a new firmware release. Alternatively application developers might be able to map those keys to carry out more versatile tasks like those I’ve mentioned above (Opera using them to Page-UP/Page-Down is the first that comes to mind). I know the leys are available in the developing enviroment though I’m not sure if they can be used for anything other than controlling volume.

Either way, am I the only one who thinks this is a good idea?
(Comments welcome below)