Ye Giant Nokia E66 Review

The Nokia E66 is a business oriented smartphone from Nokia’s Eseries line, that is the successor to the popular E65.

We trialed the Nokia E66 White Edition for a couple weeks now, and we were very impressed by this one.

Check out our (long overdue) review to know more.

The E66 is a very well equipped smartphone. Its UI is very quick and responsive and it has a huge list of features for its compact size. Connectivity is never a problem with the E66 boasting almost every single connectivity option that is currently available, including IR, Bluetooth, USB and Wifi. Combine that with the built-in GPS receiver and the very slim metallic design and you’ve got yourself a great clean cut business device.

Getting on with the review, here’s a few of the E66′s many features :

* Quad-band GSM support and 3G with HSDPA 3.6Mbps
* 2.4″ 16M-color display with QVGA resolution
* Symbian 9.2 OS Feature Pack 1 (With FP2 Transitions)
* Accelerometer motion-sensor Built-in
* 369 MHz ARM 11 CPU with 128 MB of SDRAM
* Wi-Fi and Built-in GPS receiver with A-GPS
* 3 megapixel auto focus camera with Single LED flash
* 110 MB internal memory,Ships with 2GB microSD card
* Compact body (62.6cc only)
* Stainless steel casing
* Standard 2.5mm audio jack, FM Radio
* Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP, Infrared and microUSB v2.0

And that’s just a few, you can check the full list of features on the Nokia E66 Spec Page.

The Nokia E66 measures 107.5 x 49.5 x 13.6 mm and weighs in at 121 grams, so its definitely pretty dang compact.

Its build quality is top notch. The phone is mainly stainless steel, and there are no creaks whatsoever. Its slider is very slick and snappy, and there’s no wiggle at all.

On with the pictures !

Front View :

Slide Closed :

The front of the device has the crisp bright screen. At the top there’s the earpiece speaker with the light sensor and front-facing VGA camera well hidden on either side.

Below the screen, we have the left and right selection keys, along with the Dpad and Green Call Key & Red Call End Key. The Delete Key (which is the “C” key in Nseries Phones), is right in the center under the Dpad. The Dpad has a pulsating “breathing” light feature that temporarily lights up every minute, and blinks every couple of seconds if you have a missed call, or received a text message thats not checked yet. This feature can be turned off though.

We also have 3 shortcut keys in addition to a 4th Menu key. These light up when the device is being used. By default these are assigned to the Calender App, Contacts and Email/Messaging but they can be changed and assigned to other applications.

All the keys on the top slider have great feedback and we had no problems with them at all.

Slide Open :

Here, we see the Numeric Keypad of the E66. Each key is very easily distinguishable and has good feedback. Its definitely one of the best we’ve used so far.

Back View :

The back has the huge prominent stainless steel cover, proudly showing the Nokia Eseries Branding with the Average 3.2 MegaPixel AutoFocus Camera (No Carl Zeiss here I’m afraid). There’s also a single LED flash present.
On the extreme left-top side is the loudspeaker, and the left-bottom has the lanyard cable inlet.

Top View :

The Top of the E66 only houses its Red Power Button. Strange color, I know, but it looks much better on the E66 White Edition than the grey version.

Bottom View :

Here, the E66 only has its charging port.

Left View :

On its left side, the E66 has its 2.5mm Audio Jack. It would have been nice to have had a 3.5mm standard audio jack here, so you could use normal headphones with with the E66, but Nokia assumed business people wouldnt do that.

There’s also the microUSB port, which has a hard plastic cover to prevent dust getting in. Next to it, is an IR port, and one of two Back-cover releases switches, which are on either side of the E66.

Right View :

The Right side of the E66 has the other of the two back-cover release switches, and has the dedicated camera button next to it. There’s also the Volume increase/decrease buttons, which double as Zoom In/Out in the Camera mode. In the middle of the volume keys, is the Call-Mute key which is also used to use the Voice-Tag Command feature of the E66.

The Battery :

To remove the E66′s back cover, you have to push the release switches on either side of the device. Once you do this, the stainless steel back cover pops up and is easily removed.

The E66 uses the BL-4U battery, which is the reason for the E66′s great battery life. We’ve found this device to last 2 days easy, with moderate use of WiFi, GPS, Texting and Email.

The Box :

Standard Eseries Box for the Euro Variant.

Included in retail package :

The E66 comes with a 2GB microSD card. There’s microUSB connector cable, and the E66 Headset. The White Edition E66 comes with a white headset, with red and black headphone covers.

The White Edition comes with a nice White Leather Pouch and White Leather Lanyard Cable.

You also get the standard new Nokia charger, and a couple brochures with the E66 Manual, depending on your region.

You can check out our unboxing video post to know more about what ships with the E66.

Firmware :

The E66 in this review is on version 102.07.81.

The Camera :

The E66 has a very standard 3.2 MP camera with autofocus. Its results are just slightly better than the E71, and is nothing great really.

The Camera Interface is almost completely identical to the Nseries Camera App.

The E-Series Symbian UI :-

The E66 uses Symbian Os 9.2 Feature pack 1 like the Nokia N95, N81 and N82 . However, while many things remain the same between the E66and its N-series counterparts, it does get a couple of bonus extra features from Feature Pack 2.

Because of its Operating System, you can install a variety of S60 applications or games on the E66.

The active standby home screen :

I have to say this. The E66, just like its sibling the E71, has one of the quickest and fastest UIs that I’ve used on any Symbian device so far. Everything is snappy and I like it.

The Active Standby shows you the current date and time, along with the current profile name and network operator name. There’s a battery and Network reception strength indicator. You can have size application shortcuts here, all changeable. There’s also a WLAN scanning plugin and Calender entry plugin.

You can have an email shortcut as one of the active standby plugins on the screen. One thing N-series users have wanted for a long time now, is the ability to choose which plugins to display on the screen (N-series devices only allow you to either hide all the shortcuts completely or display them all). Its a standard feature for E-series devices, and is hence in the E66 too.

There’s also a new smart dialing feature (thats also on the E71) which helps you quickly find a contact straight from the standby screen. All you have to do is type a few letters on the home screen and all contacts with names (first or last) containing them get displayed.For example for “CJ” you’d have to type “25“.

The E66 also has the same “Switch Mode” application thats on the E71. What the Modes utility allows you to do, is to be able to change your active standby screen between business mode and personal mode just by selecting the “Switch mode” button :

This might come in really useful to people who prefer to have one separate bunch of shortcuts on their screen for business mode and another set for personal mode.

I cant see myself using this feature, if I had it, but I’m guess there are many others who would.

The Menu :

The menu of the E66 is pretty much the basic boring old E-series icons and menu style.

(Note: For our review, we’ve used a theme on the E66 called “Pure White” by PiZero)

The E66 feature pack 1 but has “pretty” Feature Pack 2 transitions when you go from folder to folder. Here’s a short video of the transitions :

It does the job well enough. No complaints here.

The E66 also has a built in Accelerometer, which means you can shift between portrait and landscape orientation in almost any application or menu just by tilting the device in the correct direction.

Internet browsing :

One thing of the many things that the E66 does well, is Internet browsing. There’s Flash Lite 3 onboard which means you can view youtube and other videos online with no hassle.

The E66 uses its screen real estate beautifully for this task, and you can even use it fullscreen.

Messaging and Typing :

The E66 doesnt have the QWERTY Keypad of its sibling the E71, and this might be the only section where it loses out to the E71.

However, for people who prefer the traditional T9 keypad layout, the E66 is spot-on. All the numeric keys have great feedback and is a pleasure to use. The E66 does support external bluetooth keyboards, if that is an issue.

Each received message has the sender’s name and a short summary along with the time the messaged was received at. There is also a builtin message reader for those busy moments when you’d prefer to listen to your received message than read it.

Email is also, not a problem on the E66. Just enter in a few details and it’ll start pulling in your Email at a set time interval. You can choose to download the Headers only, or the whole email with attachments.

Calender and Contacts :

The E66 has the same great Calender application that I’ve grown to love on the E71. It has a separate section where the date is listed and on the right side, tells you what your appointment or to do list for the day is.

Also improved, is the Contacts application, which has a couple transitions too.

The Gallery :

The Gallery on the E66 is severely lacking compared to its Nseries counterparts.

Its Image gallery only displays thumbnails in a list.

Search :

The Search Application is pretty much the same. Nothing new here.

GPS :

The E66 has builtin GPS. When tested with my N82, the lock on time was pretty much the same. There’s Nokia Maps too, which you can use for turn by turn navigation instructions.

Music :

There is nothing new in the nokia music player experience here. Its pretty much the same as the N-series music player.

The lack of dedicated music keys is easily overcome by the D-pad control.Audio formats supported include MP3, AAC, eAAC+ and WMA. M3U playlists are also detected.

Apart from the above:

The E66 ships with Adobe PDF and an application called “QuickOffice” that lets you view word files or excel files etc.

Because of the Built-in Accelerometer, the E66 also has a Flip-to-Silent and Tap-to-Silent feature, which silents the phone’s incoming call or alarm if you flip the phone on its back, or tap it.

Conclusion :

Rating:

The Nokia E66 is one sleek business phone. The screen is large, bright and crisp. The camera is pretty much the only gripe I could find with it. The phone is very feature rich, and we had no cellular network reception issues with it at all. The Nokia E66 White Edition also makes the device look a lot better than its grey variant.

If you dont like the monoblock formfactor of the Nokia E71 and prefer sliders, we highly recommend you check out the Nokia E66.