Awesome_Aleks

A few weeks ago I received the Nokia E66 for trial from WOM World (thanks goes to WOM World)

I thought I would post my impressions here to people who are considering the phone, or are just looking for something to read

I received a Steel Grey E66 with Firmware V200 on it

Sorry, no pictures (I forgot to take them )

Design

What better place to start a phone review then with what you see at first glance?

First of all this phone is of perfect build quality. There are no creaks, squeaks or anything else to complain about. The phone feels extremely solid, which is probably helped by the fact it utilises a lot of ultra-shiny metals. The metals are the most attractive finger-print magnets I have ever seen, even beating the glossy black plastic used on my N81.

The slide action is yet again, solid. At first it felt a little under-assisted but after my time with this phone was over I found the N81's slider ultra-tight and cheap feeling, and wishing it had the E66's slide action.

I found the phone to be nice-looking in real-life, aside from the lip at the bottom of the top half of the slider which I found a little awkward. I would have preferred it if the top half met the bottom half seamlessly at the bottom like it does at the top, but thats my subjective view.

I found the keys good, especially the D-Pad, as they all felt nice and solid (that word again ) compared with my N81's creaky cheap feeling keys. I had a small problem with the Volume Up key on the E66 which had no feel at all, if you are considering using this phone as a music player that could become very annoying. The alphanumeric keys were well-spaced and easy to tell apart without having to use your eyes, so you can send a text without having to look at your phone.

The display was colourful and bright, and the ambient light detector meant it didn't burn my eyes when I checked the time at night (unlike my N81...)

User Interface

The E66's S60 FP1 User Interface felt much snappier and faster to use then my N81. The E66 utilises some FP2 transitions but they aren't as nice looking or resource heavy as the ones the N81 got in it's V20 firmware update.

I thought I would really like the Automatic Screen Rotation feature, and while I do believe it is a handy feature it was sometimes sluggish to use. I also encountered a bug where even though the phone's orientation had been changed the phones D-Pad would not change and would go in the wrong direction when you pressed on it. This only occurred when changed orientations many times though, and it always sorted itself out within a few seconds.

One of the fantastic E Series niceties that I wish I had n my N81 was a feature in which you hold down one of the keys on the D-Pad once the screen has deactivated and it comes up in large, high-contrast writing with the time and the date as well as a few other service indicators. I thought this was a great feature and I'd be willing to give up some of the N Series niceties for it.

Main Features

Here I will outline some of the mian features of the device

Wi-Fi

This worked exactly as expected, and very similarly to the N81. I was easily able to set-up an Access Point for the WiFi connection in my home, and I found it more reliable then my N81 in being able to connect to it.

HSDPA

I surfed the web a fair amount using the E66 and thanks to the speedy 3.6Mbps HSDPA connection it loaded web pages much faster then my N81. In the time I had the phone I also connected it to my computer and used it as a modem when I downloaded to much on our internet and got capped to 64kbps. The E66 worked reasonably well as a modem once connected, and was infinitely faster then a terrible 64kbps connection I would otherwise be stuck on

GPS

I didn't use this feature much with my time with the device. When I activated A-GPS it did find my house and download the maps for it while I was indoors but it took a few minutes. Not a major problem though as I hear this is par for the course.

Camera

The E66 has a 3.2 megapixel Autofocus Camera with an LED Flash. While the shots in normal light were OK the shots in low light weren't much better then my horrific N81

The E66 can also record video at a QVGA resolution at 15 fps which matches my N81. This is a bit poor but I guess it is a business oriented-handset

Other Features

Music Player

The Music Player was similar in looks to the N Series Audio Player, the audio quality however was not as good as my N81. The E66 also has its 2.5mm jack on the left hand side of the phone which is really inconvenient if you have the phone in a phone pocket with headphones plugged in

Gallery

The Gallery was rather ordinary compared with the N Series Gallery like the one on my N81, although the use of ASR gained a few points.

E Series Specialties

The E66 came pre-installed with a whole range of special E Series applications like a Dictionary which wasn't as useful as I had hoped for (although the words I was looking up were rather sophisticated)

The Calendar seemed more handy then the usual S60 Calendar but I really don't use it for anything apart from checking the date occasionally

Also, Download! was absolutely filled with stuff to download, making my N81 look empty in comparison

Battery Life

My time with the E63 (I will hopefully post a review of that soon) showed excellent battery life

Unfortunately I didn't find the E66 as good as it at all, in fact I found it was worse then my N81. I'm not sure whether I used it more then my N81 but when I browsed the web I found it dropping bars surprisingly quickly by the end of the day. The N81 on the other hand (with only a slightly bigger battery) was able to last longer, although I'm guessing it's slower internet isn't as power hungry as the E66's.

Reception

While not a cause for concern I found the E66 to have slightly worse reception then my N81 in my household, rather then full bars all the time it would occasionally drop a bar or two of reception. This did not effect real-life use of the phone at all.

What's In The Box

The phone comes jam-packed with extras

Theres the Phone, the Battery, the Charger, a USB Cable, a Headset, a Lanyard, a Carrying Case and a 2GB microSD memory card and the usual user guide books and leaflets. I wish Nokia did this for all of their phones!

Final Thoughts

A few years ago the E Series division of Nokia were losing money and they needed a comparatively "normal" phone in order to make them money. This resulted in the Nokia E65, which was a hit and sold very quickly despite its relatively outdated S60 3.0 OS (when Nokia had started making S60 3.1 phones) and lackluster mono headset in the box.

Fast forward to now and Nokia debut the successor, the E66 which improves upon the E65 in every possible way. But this time it's the E71 that has become the runaway hit, with it appearing absolutely everywhere you go thanks to its feature set, value for money and miniscule size as far as those devices go. Nokia doesn't need the "normal" E66 anymore, it can focus on business minded yet consumer oriented phones like the E71 that match both parts of the market perfectly

If you are looking at an E Series phone I would recommend the E71 as it offers a full QWERTY keyboard and is cheaper then the E66. However, if you would prefer the E66 then there is no reason not to get it as there are no major problems with it at all. The E66 is a very good phone with no major downfalls and you should be very pleased with this phone if you decide to get it as long as you aren't looking for a supreme multimedia device, but a feature-packed, no-nonsense and stylish business phone

If you have any questions I will do my best to answer them