Nokia E66 Cell Phone Review
By Alfredo Padilla
Reviewed.com Editorial Staff
June 27, 2008
The Nokia E66 is the latest business-focused device from Nokia. A slim slider, the E66 feels well put together and comfortable in the hand. The E66 does a lot to impress, with support for Exchange server, Wi-Fi, AT&T’s 3G network and a 3.2-megapixel autofocus camera, but there are some negatives as well. The E66 will be available in the third quarter of 2008 for around $500.
Dialing a number on the Nokia E66 is quick and easy. One nice new feature is that as you type out a name or number on the home screen it filters and matches numbers from your contacts. The E66 is a Symbian Series 60 smart phone, which means it has powerful productivity applications included. We were very happy to see that Nokia has made major upgrades to the Contacts and Calendar applications, making them easier to use. In particular the calendar views are much improved.
Audio quality is probably the most important feature of any phone. The Nokia E66 did well in our tests of audio sent and received; you should have no problems with those. What wasn’t as good is sidetone. Sidetone is the small amount of your own voice that a phone pipes back into your ear so you can judge how loudly you are speaking. On the E66 we found sidetone is too low, which means you may judge you’re speaking too quietly and raise your voice to compensate.
The E66 is a capable multimedia device as long as you have a large enough memory card. It is capable of supporting a Micro SDHC card up to 8GB in size. The music software is very easy to use and well organized, but slow to load. The E66 also supports several different video types, although we noticed it has trouble playing higher-quality video.
The E66’s 3.2-megapixel camera takes very good photos, although not as good as other Nokia phones like the N95. Still, the quality of photos is well above average for a cell phone, and the video quality is also good. The camera interface is well organized and gives you quick access to most features.
Running the powerful Symbian Series 60 operating system, the Nokia E66 is a full-featured smart phone. This means it is capable of multi-tasking and you can install third-party applications to extend its capabilities. The E66’s interface is generally responsive with a couple of exceptions, like the music software we mentioned above. One new feature is the ability to quickly switch between Work and Personal modes, with different themes and home screens for each. We’re quite happy with the E66’s web browser, which provides a desktop-like browsing experience and supports advanced web technologies like Flash.
The E66 also includes support for GPS and uses Nokia’s Maps 2.0 software to look up local information and directions. We should note, however, that you’ll have to pay $10 per month if you want voice guided directions. Messaging on the E66 is good, with support for many popular e-mail accounts, text and multimedia messages, as well as the ability to integrate with Microsoft’s Exchange server for push e-mail, contacts, and calendar synchronization. The e-mail interface is straightforward, but isn’t as good as what you get from a BlackBerry. We’re able to type an impressive 47 words per minute on the E66’s keypad, as fast as many phones with full QWERTY keyboards.
Where the Nokia E66 stumbles is battery life. The device sports a fairly small battery for its size and it also uses AT&T’s high-speed 3G network, which sucks battery life at a precipitous rate. The result is that we were only able to manage three hours of talk time on the E66. If you’re browsing the web you will top out at three and a half hours. Music playback was much better at almost 14 hours, probably because it doesn’t transfer data on the network. For a phone with this many capabilities, which we imagine people will be using, the E66’s poor battery performance means many won’t get through a single day on one charge.
There’s a lot to like about the E66. It delivers an impressive array of features and generally does a good job of it, something many jack-of-all-trade phones fall down with. Unfortunately we can’t ignore the terrible battery performance. Any phone quickly turns into a brick the moment the battery runs out. Targeted at business users that generally need a phone that will take a lot of use, the E66 just won’t cut it. If you’re willing to carry around a spare battery or make sure you’re always near a charger the E66 may work out for you. If not we recommend you spend your $500 elsewhere. In fact you can spend significantly less and get a capable business device like the BlackBerry Curve or Blackjack II.
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