03 Nowember 2008

User review:
Nokia E66 - One Hand Business

First Of All Thanks to WOM World/Nokia For Giving Me Opportunity To Trial Nokia E66 Device. They Gave Me Enough Time To Test The Device And Review On It. I have Tested The Device With keen intrest Now I just Want To Share My Final Thoughts On Nokia E66.

The retail package of Nokia E66 is much to our liking. For starters, the phone comes with Nokia's fastest and smallest charger. It's so tiny that you can comfortably to carry it around in a pocket. Not that you'll need it too often: the battery is rather good.

A 2GB microSD card also comes with the E66, so you're pretty well covered for the most common scenarios (unless you are among the few that do demand more storage space on their mobile phones).

A nice leather case and a leather lanyard are in the box too, and so is a CD with PC synchronization software.

The supplied handsfree, much like the E71, won't let you use the hands-free remote with another headset (no standard audio jack on it). Finally there is a whole load of paperwork including manuals, quick start guides and a few leaflets - nothing essential as usual.

UNBOXING
*click to enlarge

The Clothes:

First of All The Device has a Strong Build. I like The Design as Well as It's Build Quality, But There Is One Thing I don't Like Is That If I keep Device In My Hands For 4-5 Mins Than My Finger Print Gets appeared on It Every Where Especially On It's Back Cover, which is very annoying.

I also Thought That If Nokia Would Use An Open Jack Sysytem for Sim then It Would Be Better , Because It's Somewhat Difficult to pull the Sim card Out of The Phone .

UNBOXING
*click to enlarge

Side Features:

The charger plug and the lanyard eyelet are at the bottom. There is nothing special to note here.

On the right side of the Nokia E66 we come upon the two volume keys, the voice command key and the dedicated shutter key. They all have sufficient size and tactility and we are more than pleased with them. The one thing we didn't like here is that the camera key doesn't automatically start the camera application, so you have to launch it elsewhere from the interface.

At the top we find an unpleasant, though not unexpected, surprise. It's the same utterly tasteless cheapo red power knob much like the one on the Nokia E71. We would've only understood that styling in a self-destruct-do-not-ever-press button. Another disappointment about the power key is it's quite hard to reach when the slider is up. Be it for powering the phone on or off or for quick switching the active profile - you have to close the phone to press the key.

The steel back panel of Nokia E66 is a true redemption though. The problem we experienced with E71 still stands but fingerprint smudges are the price to be paid we guess. Reraside we find the 3 megapixel auto-focus camera lens, with LED flash and self-portrait mirror. While we can say right away that the LED flash is no good, the rest of the camera performance will be discussed in more detail latter on.

The loudspeaker grill is also to be noticed on the back panel - right in the bottom left corner.

The Software:

Nokia E66 runs on Symbian 9.2 OS with the Series60 3rd Edition user interface. Much like the E71, it has the Feature Pack 1 preinstalled but it benefits from a number of enhancements and upgrades inherent to Feature Pack 2.

Nokia E66 is powered by a single 369 MHz CPU and has 128MB of RAM. Those are some really good numbers in Symbian terms, allowing it to go fast and smooth with no holdups whatsoever. Even the new animations and transition effects that pervade the menu aren't causing problems. Memory Full warnings are highly unlikely and you should make quite an effort to deplete the available RAM.

The phone has an accelerometer, which allows its user interface to automatically rotate. In fact, this is the only feature that Nokia E66 has over the E71, and is probably more of a compensation for the fact that the landscape screen is more comfortable for browsing documents and multimedia content. Nokia have learned their lesson this time and have added a nice transition animation when changing the screen orientation.

The active standby mode goes without saying on Nokia E66. This is a nice and convenient way to bring shortcuts to all favorite applications to your home screen. You can even assign shortcuts to websites of your choice for quicker access. Furthermore, each of the one-touch keys can be customized to access any feature of choice (actually two per key).

The two soft keys functions can also vary. If active standby mode isn't activated, you can also assign shortcuts to the directions of the D-pad.

Nokia E66 has an automatic key lock. It gets activated upon a user-defined interval with the options ranging from 5 seconds to an hour. This option can also be disabled if the user sees fit. There's even a remote lock option, which prevents your personal data from being accessed, if your phone gets stolen.

A novel feature in Nokia E66 allows you to toggle between two different phone setups. Each of them can be customized with its own theme and homescreen applications for maximizing usability. This way you can have a leisure and a business profile and switch between them at a single click on your home screen.

Keypad:

An interesting detail is that the keys don't have any labels on them unless they're illuminated. This gives the phone really sleek, albeit somewhat strange looks when backlighting is off.

The final element on the front panel is the mouthpiece, which is placed on the chin right where the slider rests. The Keypad Could Be Mode More Perfect. Some times When Press The right Soft Key The Menu gets pushed . While The Text Keypad is Very Nice. Every One can Esily Write Messages Or Emails With It.

The Camera:

The camera is one element where Nokia E66 really fails to impress. The 3 megapixel resolution, the LED flash and the self-portrait mirror might seem appealing but their performance quickly ruins the good impression.

The lack of lens protection is the first problem to come to mind. This means that the camera will get scratched in no time unless you use the leather case (or any other case) all the time . At least, the E66 has a dedicated camera key which makes using the autofocus snapper much more comfortable than on the E71.

In fact this key and the camera user interface is the best part about the E66 imaging capabilities. The UI is the same as on high-profile Nokia cameraphones, offering more than extensive settings. From manual white balance and ISO sensitivity to exposure compensation, gridline, sharpness and contrast settings, as well as various effects.

Unfortunately, despite the built-in GPS, the Nokia E66 doesn't offer geotagging of its camera photos.

Comparison of Nokia E66 With
Nokia 5700 Xpress Muisc Camera:

Nokia E66	Nokia 5700
*click to enlarge

Nokia E66	Nokia 5700
*click to enlarge

Nokia E66	Nokia 5700
*click to enlarge

Battery:

The battery cover is removed by pressing the two release knobs on either side at the bottom. The all-metal part easily pops out, which is another point earned for the device. Under the cover we find the microSD card slot and the 1000 mAh Li-Ion BL-4U battery.

While it is not nearly as impressive as the 1500 mAh monster mounted on the E71, the Nokia E66 battery pulled off a more than decent performance. Quoted at 7.5 hours of talk time and 264 hours of stand-by, it sticks out a little over two full days of heavy usage. Good enough, considering the power-hungry applications in there (GPS, Wi-Fi, 2.4" screen, etc.).

Display:

Nokia E66 features a 2.4" 16M-color QVGA display. Its performance is completely up to Nokia's usual high standard with great contrast and brightness. Those make the picture really vibrant and a pleasure to look at. The ambient light sensor also makes sure the display is maximum user-friendly under any kind of lighting conditions.

Telephony:

With Nokia E66 you are extremely unlikely to experience any reception issues. Sound during calls is very clear and free of any interferences. The phone sports the really nice Smart Dialing feature, which helps you quickly find a contact straight on the standby screen. All you need to do is type some digits and all contacts with names (first or last) containing letters corresponding to them get displayed. Finally, the Nokia E66 also has support for VoIP calls - you just enter your account details and you are all set.

Messaging:

What you get with this phone is an Eseries device with a very comfortable keypad. That probably is enough to put a broad grin on a heavy texter's face.

There are four message editors on-board: SMS, MMS, audio and e-mail. The SMS editor is the well known intuitive application from the last few versions of Symbian S60. It has a counter of the characters left to the limit of 160. There is also an indicator in brackets showing the number of separate parts the message will be divided into for sending.

Email is the highlight in the Nokia E66, as it supports a wide range of personal and corporate email standards such as Microsoft Exchange, Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, Nokia Intellisync Wireless Email solution, along with System Seven and Visto Mobile. Encryption is also on board, as well as mobile VPN support for connecting to secure corporate Intranets.

Music player:

Normally one wouldn't expect a business-minded handset such as the Nokia E66 to have really fancy music features. In this case they'd be wrong: the music player is as good as Nseries, dubbed the multimedia flagships. Not that it costs Nokia much to put the time-proven Symbian S60 music player but it earns a point for the device nonetheless.

There is a huge number of audio formats supported including MP3, AAC, eAAC+ and WMA. M3U playlists are also managed seamlessly and transferred files are added to the music library trouble-free by choosing the refresh option. Furthermore, upon completing a USB transfer, the phone automatically prompts scanning for new music tracks and, if allowed to do so, adds the new ones to the music library.

Video player:

Nokia E66 features a Real player for playing your video clips. The video player works in both portrait and landscape modes, and allows switching to fullscreen.

With a screen of this size watching a video fullscreen is quite an enjoyable experience. The softkey functions are hidden, so they don't stand in the way and picture quality is good enough, so - a good general mark for Nokia E66 here.

Image gallery:

The gallery of Nokia E66 has a decently functional image gallery allowing you to do almost anything with your photos. It offers less (or more likely almost none) of the Nseries eye-candy but that isn't that much of a bother.

You can easily browse images and zoom in up to 8x. Both portrait and landscape modes are available when browsing photos. In addition, the whole browsing and zooming thing is really fast and even comparably large files aren't causing much delay. We have seen even better in some Nokias but this is a business handset I am talking about and I am more than happy with its speed.

Web browser:

The internet browser on Symbian devices is one of their best applications. Nokia E66 makes no exceptions with great page rendering and lots of customizable options. The adjustable font size, zoom level and text wrap are all there.

The virtual mouse cursor takes browsing another level up. It is easy to control and works like a charm. A mini-map can be activated to help navigating large sites where lots of scrolling is required. The web browser also offers landscape view and fullscreen is also available.

Organizer:

Time-management is one of the most important among them business phone virtues. That's why I wouldn't expect any less than the best from Nokia E66 and luckily that is exactly what we get. There are a lot of nice applications, all very user-friendly and functional.

Much like the E71, E66 has a calendar slightly different from other Symbian devices. The month view mode now allows the events for the selected day to also appear on the screen.

Finally, Nokia E66 features a dictionary with a rather rich database. English comes pre-installed and you can also download dozens of other languages for free from the Nokia download center.

GPS navigation:

One of the last things to cover in Nokia E66 is the built-in GPS receiver. Its sensitivity isn't the best you can find on the market but it can do the job if you aren't on a hurry. Our guess is that the receiver itself is the same as the one used in Nokia E71. It takes its time getting initial lock and that can be as much as 10 minutes if you cold-start it in a moving car.

The added A-GPS functionality can notably reduce this time but still won't do wonders. However, this is not a Navigator, so I probably shouldn't be too demanding. Anyway, initial lock time with A-GPS is significantly better and rarely exceeds a minute.

Nokia E66 comes with Nokia Maps application pre-installed. The 2.0 version is nice to work with and has very detailed map coverage of a huge number of countries and a lot of extras such as traffic information, voice-guided navigation and so on. Furthermore, Nokia E66 comes with a free three-month license for voice-guided navigation. The rest of the extra features however have to be purchased separately.

Conclusion:

To begin with the upgrader's point of view, I would say a jump from E65 to the E66 is totally worth it. The phone has improved in nearly every area compared to its predecessor and addresses most of its issues. The price tag is still slightly on the steep side but I guess it will be a great bargain in no time. And even as it stands now, the Nokia E66 still is a great purchase.

Note: Sorry Can't Give You The Screen Shots of The Device Applications Because I am Unable to Install Any Screeshots Capturing Software in it. I have Taken All pictured from My Nokia 5700 So the Images are Some What Blurry.

SF Review: Nokia E66 - One Hand Business!?
Originally posted: 02.11.2008
Last Updated: 03.11.2008
Author: Farhan Rasheed
Photos: Fonky
Copyright: Symbian Freak 2008; all rights reserved