Phones.com » Cell Phones » Review of the Nokia E66

The Nokia E66 is an extremely compact slider. In fact its the slimmest smartphone slider so far in the market. The front panel shows the attractive 2.4" portrait screen, with five soft keys, a D-pad and Call, End buttons below it. A nice addition for a smartphone, the metal accent around the front panel is very attractive. Besides, the back panel is metal plated too, giving the E66 a unique feel. The slider measures 107.5 x 49.5 x 13.6 mm and weighs a heavy 121 grams. The handset therefore feels solid in one's hands, but is somewhat prone to fingerprints. The keys are hard and offer good feedback, including the numeric keypad. A weird inclusion is an untasteful red button for the power key on the top of the front panel. This kind of a key is unseen in previous Nokia handsets, let alone E-series phones. The front softkeys include easy access to applications like messaging, contacts and calendar. A new E-series innovation is the switching between 'Home' and 'Business' homescreens. The rear of the handset has a Camera with LED Flash, and a self-portrait mirror. Besides, the loudspeaker is located on the back too. The left side of the E66 has a headset jack and USB connector, besides the Infrared port. The right side hosts the volume controls, voice recognition key and a microSD slot.

The features of the Nokia E66 are typical of an E-series Smartphone. The handset is very similar in terms of functionality to the E71. The E66 runs the SymbianOS 9.2 with S60 3.1. While it means the E66 is an FP1 device, many features from the Feature Pack 2 are also included on it. The switching between Home and Business homescreens are a nice addition. Many shortcuts make the E66 stand apart from previous E-series handsets. On the technical side, the E66 is powered by an ARM11 369 MHz processor and 128 MB of SDRAM. We seldom run out of RAM on such a device, and the phone has an internal memory of 110 MB for storage. The hot-swappable microSD slot accepts cards with up to 32 GB of storage. The screen has an auto-rotate feature with a nice animation, so you can just rotate the phone and find the display rotate itself. The multimedia side of the phone is really good with support for every format. An FM Radio with Visual Radio support is present, but there's no RDS. The 3.2 MP camera with Auto Focus is of moderate quality, but is a great addition. Watching photos and videos on the large QVGA screen is great at 16 M colors. The UI of the phone is really an advantage to both Business and Leisure users. The message reader reads out new SMS and Emails with the press of a button. GPS is integrated into the handset, unfortunately there's no support for geo-tagging of photos you take with the E66. Navigation with the included Nokia Maps software was very good. It also works seamlessly with Google Maps and other software. Nokia also gives you a 3-month trial license for Nokia Maps along with the E66.

The Nokia E66 is available both for US region and Europe/Asia-Pacific. The phone is dual-band HSDPA compatible, with the US version supporting HSDPA 850/1900 MHz bands while the European one HSDPA 900/2100 bands. HSDPA is supported for data download rates up to 3.6 Mbps. The phone is furthermore Quad-band GSM compatible, with support for EDGE and GPRS data transfer (compatible with Class 32 - up to 100kbps for GPRS and 296 kbps for EDGE). There's also all kinds of local connectivity included, with support for WLAN networks on 802.11 b/g. Bluetooth 2.0 A2DP and EDR with all profiles is present. Infrared is also included on this stylish slider. A miniUSB port on the left side allows Full-speed USB connections with a PC.

The Nokia E66 being a compact slider, is equipped with a 1000 mAh Li-ion battery. While this is smaller and less impressive than the 1500 mAh present on other E-series handsets, the Nokia E66 is power efficient. It manages to squeeze out at least seven and half hours of talk time on both 2G and 3G networks. Standby is also quite good at about 11-15 days.

The Nokia E66 offers the best of both worlds - leisure and business. It is appropriately priced for being a powerful business tool and communicator for many. The E66 goes out of the full-QWERTY tradition but still offers a full range of smartphone functionality expected of a business device. While its not very cheap at about 350 dollars, it is less expensive than the many bulky smartphone sliders that are only compromises in business features.