Nokia E66 review

Nokia E66 is a a versatile cell phone, which is not designed only for entertaining business people. Like E71 it uses operating system S60 3 edition Feature Pack one, with many additions which make this phone useful both at work and at home. E66 also has two different displays, one for business and one for free time. The totally right icon on the default display is a switch mode button, which you can use to switch between business display and the display for free time. On both displays you can adjust your six shortcuts to display the things you really need, which differ from business use (calendar, calculator, emails, wlan availability...) to home use (music player, radio, maps...). This feature is really useful as you can totally personalize your cell phone to suit your demands both at work and at home.

The calendar displayed is same both at business mode and at fun mode, so if you are to look at the calendar you shall see everything you have entered regardless of the mode you are currently using, which is quite good in some ways, though it might cause problems if you have a lot of information stored in it. User interface ensures you can search for contacts rapidly, even if the display is in stand by mode. All you have to do is to press a button and the phone will display all the contacts, whose names or surnames begin with the selected letter. With each new letter added, the phone automatically displays only the possible contacts. Once you find the contact, you can press the right button and you can choose whether you want to call the person, send him a SMS, MMS, email or VoIP (of course the phone displays only the information you have previously entered for specific contact - if you do not have someone's email than the phone will not offer you to send him and email). This feature is really useful as it makes contacting people really easy and what is most important fast. As E66 does not have QWERTZ keypad it uses a special algorithm for guessing the desired contact based on small amount of input. For instance, if you are searching for contact named "connect" you do not have to press three times 2, three times 6 and so on, but you can press only 2, 6, 6, 6, 3, 2 and 8 and the phone will guess what you meant. Amazing. Finding a contact is thus a very easy and fast task.

Sending emails is simplified to the maximum. If you are using well known email accounts (gmail, yahoo...) you do not have to enter any additional information about servers and so on, only account name and password is required. Microsoft Exchange also functions better, yet it still can not handle multiple folders.

In order to secure your data the phone can encrypt both internal memory and the memory card. Emails are secured as well. E66 also has a special feature that some S60 cell phones also have - remote lock. You have to enter at least 5 characters long text/code into internal memory and then once the phone receives an SMS containing that text/code it will automatically lock itself. This is very useful if your phone gets stolen, you just send an SMS and
thus both protect your confidential data and disable the possible use of your phone by the thief. In order to unlock it you just have to enter the password.

Most of the software is identical to the one E71 has. The only difference is (or was, depends on which firmware you have on E71) that E66 shows animation while opening or sliding through things.

The outer appearance of E66 reveals a stylish business oriented smart phone. The phone is really well built, as it is made out of steel and high quality plastic. The only "disadvantage" is that the phone gets dirty very fast, because of its design and materials. High quality buttons and keypad are very accurate and offer good feedback. Writing is very comfortable, yet not as much as it is with E71.

Camera is located on the back side of the phone and it is the same as at E71 (3,2MP). It is not a top notch camera like some phones from N series have, but it should be more than enough for a businessman. It also has a flash light, but not a very useful one. Though you can capture really great photos with this phone, if the light conditions are suitable.

E66 also has an integrated GPS receiver, which support feature Assisted GPS. GPS really does it's job well. It is quite easy to navigate as the phone has a 2,4 inch LCD dsiplay, which is more than enough for normal navigation. In order to add GPS coordinates into a captured photo you must install application Locr, which can be found on Nokia website. Even though it is a business oriented cell it has application Nokia Sports Tracker (which can measure and calculate speed, distance...).

This is a great cell phone, very similar to E71. The main difference is that E71 is designed for those who prefer QWERTZ keypad and E66 for those who prefer slide phones.