E Series Meets The Slider Craze

Gone are the days when Nokia used to make great, ugly looking phones. The E66 may be part of their business class E series but it’s a serious multimedia phone as well. This slider phone is the non-QWERTY equivalent of the E71, which we reviewed earlier and found to have a cramped keypad. The offwhite body finish is attractive but not overly so. The rear cover is solid steel which imparts both weight as well as a rugged feel. The front bezel is rimmed in chrome; the buttons on the front are transparent fibre on chrome which blends in with the bezel. The slider is built to last; this phone feels extremely solid inhand and even the finish exudes a quality feel. The screen at 2.4-inches is crisp and bright; although we do not like the animated style of icons which Nokia has been persisting with.

The outer keys are built well, but not bevelled which may cause a few false key presses; nothing serious though. Dedicated hard shortcut keys for emails, contacts and calendar functions have been provided.

The call accept/reject buttons are large and easy to use. The four-way joypad and middle button are large and comfortable to use; ergonomics are top class. Key backlighting is very good. The number pad is well laid out and the keys are very large which is good news for ham handed blokes. We feel this keypad would suit all people; top points to Nokia here. SMS junkies will have a good time and none of us had any issues whatsoever with the number pad. However for a business phone we have to admit some users may need a full QWERTY keypad; in which you may want to look at the E71. The volume buttons on the side are large and easy to use. Nokia has included additional goodies like Bluetooth with A2DP support, WLAN and GPS. The E66 comes with 110 MB of inbuilt memory and this is expandable via microSD.

All this makes the E66 a loaded device. A 2.5-mm jack has been provided for the handsfree kit; we feel Nokia goofed up in not offering a standard 3.5-mm jack since many people will want to use their own earphones for music and such. The quality of accessories is also top class. Music quality if the E66 is strictly okay; we feel the earplugs could be the culprit but with the lack of any 3.5-mm connectivity we could not use our reference earplugs to test this. However due to the restriction of earplugs do not buy this phone if music is your thing; there are far better options around. The 3.2 megapixel camera is strictly so-so; there are much better 3.2 MP units around. The flash is substandard; but to the E66s defence it’s a business phone. So the camera part is strictly cosmetic.

The GPS part of the phone is something we like; you can work offline using Nokia maps’ preloaded maps or go online with either Nokia Maps or Google Maps (which is also provided). However once started we had a problem getting Google Maps to close and the application could not even be endtasked.

A firmware patch should address this problem; but we had to restart the phone to shut off Google Maps. The phone has an inbuilt accelerometer which Nokia has been including in all their higher range of phones. Although this gets annoying at times to find the screen has re-oriented this can be switched off. All considered we feel it’s a decent inclusion. Despite the fact that the E66 shares the same hardware under the hood as the Nokia N95 8 GB we found this phone to be sluggish; some applications take awhile to open and running any heavy multimedia tasks means the phone will take awhile to switch to other tasks. In-call quality is good and the E66 has a good inbuilt antenna that offers good reception and voice quality. The voice quality while on loudspeaker is good too.

The quality on the handsfree unit is decent; we’ve seen better from Nokia. The 1,000 mAh battery is acclaimed by Nokia to give seven and a half hours of talktime; we measure this at around five hours — not bad.

Overall the E66 impresses but we’re more concerned about its target audience. Hardcore business users will look for something a little more err hardcore, while multimedia users will find performance of the multimedia player and camera components lacking. So the E66 gets stuck between a rock and a hard place; or more aptly between a businessman and a college goer. At Rs 23,689; its well priced. Anyone willing to look past its few (albeit noticeable) flaws will be rewarded with a feature rich, superbly built and long lasting device.

E Series Meets The Slider Craze

Gone are the days when Nokia used to make great, ugly looking phones. The E66 may be part of their business class E series but it’s a serious...