Nokia E66: A Business phone which entertains you!

Nokia E66

Nokia has released E66 & E71 around mid July. Both are business class phones designed for the way we work. I had Nokia E66 in my hand to review & here we go!

Finish of E66 is really awesome, slider, 2.4″ 16.7 million colors screen, wide key pad with quick access buttons….it’s a complete package. Let’s go one by one rather telling everything here & messing it up!

Receiving, Making, Managing Calls:

Call clearity is really good in E66, I could hear clearly even in Bangalore traffic! E66 comes with “Advanced Call Manager” which lets you manage your calls as you like. You can opt to receive/reject all calls, calls from contacts, from whitelist/Blacklist. When you select to reject, you have options to send busy tone, automatically reply by SMS, divert to different number & use Phone’s Answering Machine. This makes easy to handle calls while you are in meeting or busy with work.

Email, Messaging:

E66 supports SMS, MMS & Emails on IMAP & POP servers. It also has inbuilt configuration for known email services like Gmail. When you enter your Gmail ID, it automatically configures to IMAP. I configured two email IDs one is gmail & another one is techbangalore mail. Both worked fine on Vodafone EDGE connection, fetching emails was pretty smooth. E66 can sync your Outlook address book with contacts which makes composing new mails easy. It also has “Switch” service which helps you migrate your data from old phone to the new E66.

Connectivity:

E66 supports all types of connectivity, IR, USB, Bluetooth, WiFi & also VPN! Through VPN connectivity you can connect to your office intranet. WLAN Wiz searches for available WiFi networks & you can easily connect to any of them. It supports GPRS, EDGE & 3G technologies for internet connectivity. It has Print support, you can connect printer & take print outs.You can also use wireless bluetooth keyboard, which is not included in package.

Documents, Office Tools:

Nokia E66 has Quick Office with which you can open all types of office documents; word docs, spreadsheets & presentations. But it has limited license, you can’t create a document on your phone. You have to pay for full license for complete features. It also has Acrobat Reader which will be helpful to read e-books in PDF format on the go. It has useful Multi Card reader application which can capture contact details from business/visiting cards & save it in one button press! It can capture text from any hard copy. It also has Barcode reader, I think, which will not be useful for many of us.

Global Positioning System (GPS):

Nokia E66 is a GPS device with Nokia Maps. This is not network dependent as it connects to satellite to find your position. Network is required only in few cases like, to get traffic info, to install guides…etc. You have to download map of your region from Nokia Website & load it to phone. GPS worked pretty accurate in Bangalore, it knew each cross which I traveled! Voice guided navigation is pretty helpful while riding, but it’s free for only 7 days. You have to purchase full license to use it after that period.

Camera:

I was surprised to see business phone having a 3.2 mega pixel camera. But when you look at photographs, quality is about average. Camera has bright flash, 4x digital zoom, auto focus & few presets. I was surprised to see video quality obtained by this device, it’s pretty descent. It has a front camera which is only meant for Video Calls, which is of no use here as video calling is not supported by network. Camera is ok if you are not thinking seriously about photography. You can see few photographs & a video taken from this device at http://www.flickr.com/photos/hnprashanth/sets/72157606651697037/

Music, Videos:

The last thing to look in a business phone, Music is average on Nokia E66. It has basic music player which plays MP3 & few other audio formats. Music in earphones at full volume is not so audible in noisy environment like while traveling. I think that’s most important, because we usually listen to music while traveling. Music through loudspeaker is quite bad actually, it’s not so clear & distorted. Loudspeaker is kept at wrong place, it’s at bottom left corner where usually we keep our hand! The phone has Real Player & Flash player to play videos. You can install other video players to play different formats. As it supports flash, you can watch online videos too.

Conclusion:

A business phone which also has descent camera & music with it. If camera & music are high priority for you, then this is not a good buy. You can look for Nokia N95 or any Sony Erricson walkman/cybershot series. This is mainly meant for business class people which makes many things easier; like printing, reading documents, wireless keyboard support, wireless presenter, business card reader, LAN through VPN…etc. E66 is avialable in India for arround RS.23.5k