Nokia E66: deceptively simple

For a mobile with the power of a smartphone and the form factor of a standard handset, look no further than the Nokia E66. It’s the latest addition to Nokia’s Enterprise range of mobiles, but at first glance you’d probably mistake it for one of its fashion-oriented phones.

The E66 is a striking handset, clad in a slim, stainless steel casing that looks and feels more like an expensive Zippo lighter than a mobile phone. Nokia hasn’t tried for any fancy input mechanisms on the E66, opting instead for a refreshingly straightforward non-touchscreen display that slides up to reveal a standard numeric keypad.

In stark contrast to the E66’s modern good looks, the user interface is decidedly retro – and not in a good way. We’re not sure if Nokia was trying to emphasise the E66’s business skew by taking all the ‘fun’ out of the main menu’s icons, but the drab interface makes what’s otherwise a feature-packed phone less of a joy to use. The learning curve is a short one as the main menu uses a conventional four-by-three grid of icons, but its simplicity is deceptive – programs and options aren’t always logically organised, and some settings are buried three or four layers deep in the menu.

If the lack of graphical eye candy doesn’t put you off, there’s a lot to like in the E66’s extensive set of features. It may be the size and shape of an everyday ‘dumb’ phone, but the inclusion of HSDPA, 802.11b/g WLAN and assisted GPS – not to mention its use of the Symbian OS 9.2 Series 60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 1 operating system – has it sitting firmly in the smartphone camp.

The E66 also has a few modern features that we haven’t seen on any other smartphone. The Switch Mode function lets you have two different home screens – one for work, and one for personal – complete with different wallpaper, email notifications and program shortcuts. There’s also a ringer mute feature that lets you silence an incoming call by simply placing the E66 face down on a flat surface.

The E66’s 2.4-in QVGA display is small for surfing the net, but the excellent built-in web browser makes the limited viewing area less of an issue. Websites designed for desktop viewing are rendered perfectly on the E66, and the default setting has it configured to zoom in on a subsection of the page and then zoom out to full desktop layout when you’re panning the cursor around.

Nokia Maps 2.0 is on-board for using with the E66’s built-in GPS, which includes Australia-wide maps that you can either download over the air as you need them or transfer them from a PC. Most navigation features are on-board, but voice guidance is a subscription service that costs $124 for a year.

The E66 isn’t really designed for multimedia, but that’s not to say it can’t double as a portable media player – if you don’t mind the smaller 2.5mm earphone jack. The music player supports all the major audio codecs, and videos are easily converted to a compatible format using the desktop Nokia PC Suite software. Those expecting the same excellent picture quality of the N Series from the E66’s 3.2-megapixel camera will be disappointed. It uses the same camera software, but we found a lot of colour bleeding and oversharpening artefacts in our test photos.

We wouldn’t recommend the E66 if you go through a lot of email. It supports Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync (using a separately downloaded Mail 4 Exchange program) and the usual web, POP and IMAP accounts, but it’s limited to displaying email in plain text format. Most file attachments are supported, however, the included Docs To Go software doesn’t let you edit Office files – for that, you’ll need to pay an upgrade fee. Plus, the numeric keypad is limiting for text entry; we’d choose it over a touchscreen keyboard any day, but for long missives a full QWERTY thumb-board – like that on its sibling, the E71 – is a much better option.

The E66 wasn’t 100% stable in our testing – it crashed when we were setting up a Yahoo email account and slowed down considerably when loading a demanding webpage. One of the downsides of its small size is that it can only fit a 1,000mAh battery, from which you can expect to charge the phone every one-and-a-half to two days.