Nokia E66 (US model E66-2)

The phone is fairly small by Nokia S60 smartphone standards, being both smaller and thinner than the N78, and thinner than the Nokia N95. It's the only phone among these 3 to support automatic screen rotation. Turn the phone left or right and the display switches to landscape mode. Turn it back to normal upright position and the display returns to portrait. Screen rotation isn't overly sensitive, so the screen didn't switch with normal slight hand movement (a good thing), but it sometimes took it 2 seconds to switch back to portrait mode after we'd moved the phone to normal upright position. We mostly loved the rotation feature except when jogging up the stairs while using the phone, or turning the phone to look up a number while it was sitting on a desk, which created just enough motion to change screen orientation. If you're riding on a bumpy bus or otherwise engaged in a movement-inducing situation, you can disable automatic screen rotation.

The Nokia E66, Nokia N78 and Nokia N95 US edition phones.

The Enterprise Bits

What differentiates an Nseries and E series Nokia smartphone? The differences aren't always immediately apparent given the strong smattering of multimedia features in E series phones and good syncing capabilities and full email client among Nseries phones. E series models have enterprise-friendly features like support for Exchange ActiveSync, Mail for Exchange and Intellisync. As already mentioned, there will be no BlackBerry Connect support for the E66, which is a shame. For the security minded business folk, there's a new encryption application can encrypt the contents of internal memory and cards. There's also secure certificate support, mobile VPN and 802.11 WEP/WPA/WPA2 security.

Though Nseries phones share a similar software bundle (again the lines blur between the two series), the E series certainly has the business basics covered with a full PIM suite that syncs to Outlook/ Exchange and the Mac OS X address book/ iCal (Mac users, download Nokia's iSync plugin here); Quickoffice to view; create and edit MS Word, Excel and PowerPoint files, Adobe PDF viewer; unit converter, bar code reader (uses the camera for square barcodes); system-wide (and Internet) search, File Manager, translation dictionary, Zip utility; Intranet app (works in conjunction with VPN) and support for Bluetooth wireless keyboards and printers. The phone's address book is virtually limitless and there are fields for just about everything found in Outlook. There's the usual S60 support for groups, and you can assign a ringtone to an individual contact or a group. You can sort contacts by last or first name, but (still!) not by company.

In terms of performance, the E66 runs on a 369 MHz single core ARM processor and it has 116 megs of free internal storage at boot. The phone comes with a 2 gig microSD card for additional storage-- thanks, Nokia.

Phone and Data

Since the Nokia E66 NAM is a quad band unlocked GSM phone, it will work for voice and GPRS/EDGE data with AT&T and T-Mobile in the US as well as any other GSM carrier in the US and abroad. For 3.5G HSDPA, the North American version supports the 850 and 1900MHz bands used by AT&T in the US (T-Mobile US doesn't yet have 3G). It doesn't have the Eurasian 3G bands, so if you travel overseas and wish to use data, it will be EDGE, not 3G. The Nokia automatically configures data and MMS settings at boot by detecting your carrier from the SIM. It correctly configured itself for AT&T and T-Mobile in our tests.

Voice quality is excellent, as we've come to expect from Nokia. Volume is adequate and voice clarity for incoming and outgoing calls is excellent. The speakerphone is loud and clear as well. Nokia phones generally have some of the best RF we've seen, but the E66 isn't stellar. Rather it's a bit below average on T-Mobile's 1900MHz network, getting about -8db weaker reception than the N95, and middling on AT&T's 850MHz GSM network and on their 1900MHz 3G network. Why differences on the same 1900MHz band? Because there are 2 radios in the phone: one handles GSM and the other 3G. If you're in a fringe reception area, especially on T-Mobile, then you may run into problems. If you're in moderate to excellent coverage areas, then the E66 should do just fine.

As with most Nokia S60 phones, the Nokia E66 comes with voice command software and some text to speech features. Again, like most Nokia S60 phones, voice command does a terrible job of recognizing commands, with 50% success rate at best. There's a dedicated voice command key on the phone's side (nested between the volume up and down keys), should you wish to use it.

Data speeds are subjectively excellent, even with a 50% strength HSDPA signal on AT&T's network. Web pages load quickly and Nokia's excellent web browser supports most full HTML sites with excellent fidelity. The only thing we wish for is higher than QVGA resolution on their S60 phones to take even better advantage of the phone's excellent rendering. The browser has a virtual mouse cursor so you need not tab from link to link, supports Javascript, a good smattering of dHTML, cookies, SSL, caching and history. Data speeds as measured using DSL Reports mobile speed test were very good at an average of 650kbit/s. The email client supports multiple accounts and can handle POP and IMAP accounts, and can check on a user-specified schedule if you're not using push email.

The Nokia E66 can play mobile YouTube (m.youtube.com) and hands off the clip to Real Player which plays in full screen landscape. Playback is excellent over WiFi and good over HSDPA. But wait, there's more: full YouTube support (select the desktop mode link at the bottom of YouTube's web page). The videos play in the browser, though they may run off the screen if the resolution is higher than 320 x 240. Playback stutters occasionally over WiFi but the video is certainly watchable. It's a bit more hairy over 3G and not something you'd want to attempt over EDGE.

Camera I'm sure you were as excited as we were when we heard that the Nokia E66 has a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus lens. Well, don't get too excited-- despite the impressive specs, the images are less than you'd expect, especially from a Nokia phone. We weren't expecting N95-level photos, after all the N95 has a 5 megapixel camera with a Carl Zeiss lens, but we were hoping they'd match the Nokia E90, N73 and N78. Nope. At least not ours. Images have noise, even on some outdoors shots and in general lack sharpness. Outdoor shots are decidedly better than indoor shots, with indoor shots looking grainy and noisy. Color balance is a little off, sometimes being too warm and other times shifting to the magenta. You can click on a sample image to see a full size version in a new window. Original file size at max resolution averages 400k. The camera application is similar to other recent E and Nseries phones with settings for color, white balance, resolution, EV and LED flash control. The entire screen acts as a viewfinder and image save times are quick. We found autofocus to be relatively quick by camera phone standards, but just in case you're taking a photo of a fast-moving subject and have no time to spare for focus, simply press the d-pad center button to take the photo in fixed focus mode. When you want to use the autofocus, press the camera button on the phone's side to autofocus and take the picture. Fixed focus shots aren't that much worse than autofocus in most cases. On our unit, the camera button on the phone's side did not launch the camera application, but the final firmware version of the phone might. The camera can also record QVGA (320 x 240) resolution video at 15 fps. Video looks decent but it obviously can't compete with the N95 and Nokia N82's 30fps VGA video. The E66 can also record video suitable for MMS and there's a shortcut to send video and photos via MMS in the camera post-view screen. You can also post these directly to the web on Nokia's Ovi sharing service, Flickr and Vox.

GPS

The Nokia E66 has an internal GPS and Nokia Maps. As with the Nokia N78, Nokia N95-3 (after recent firmware updates), and the N95 8 gig, the GPS is much quicker to get a satellite fix and can even manage from indoors if there's a window nearby. The phone accurately positioned us, and updated reliably when driving. Our E66 shipped with Maps 2.0, which offers added features such as walking mode and traffic along with big improvements to routing. Maps, POIs and positioning are free, but there's a monthly fee for navigation and routing. There's a free trial period so you can test it before signing up for a weekly, monthly or yearly plan (it costs about $100/year). While Nokia's service doesn't yet compare with TeleNav as offered by all major US carriers, it's usable and reasonably priced.

The Fun Bits

There's plenty of leisure goodness here, with Nokia's usual good music player that handles MP3, WMA and AAC (unprotected iTunes) files with support for album, artist, title and other track data. There's mobile and full YouTube, local video playback support for MPEG4 videos on internal memory or the storage card, an FM radio, Gallery, audio recorder and Podcasting support. Video playback works well with mobile-encoded video under 500kbps and the music player sounds good through wired and Bluetooth A2DP stereo headphones like the Plantronics Pulsar 590a. Nokia includes a wired stereo headset in the box (HS-47).

Here's a 1 minute video showing the E66 playing a QVGA video encoded at 450kbps that's stored on the microSD card (with a few mid-play screen rotations thrown in):

Gaming is a pleasure on the Nokia E66, and we were impressed with the free downloadable "Global Race Raging Thunder" 3D driving game (get it through the Downloads icon on the Nokia). The phone handles the graphically intensive (by phone standards) game well with nary a frame drop or falter. You can see a video of this game in action here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFZdStSDlS8. At press time, the only other game available through Nokia's download service was Solitaire, but we hope to see more once the phone is released. Clearly it's up to the task of serious gaming, even if it isn't an N-Gage 2.0 device.

Battery Life

The E66 comes with a very compact world charger with US prongs and a 1000 mAh Lithium Ion battery (BL-4U). Battery life in 3G coverage areas is quite good, depending on what you're doing. Playing video for an hour or using the GPS for a long trip will eat the battery up more quickly. But average use includes 30 minutes talk time, surfing the web for an hour (mix of WiFi and 3G), checking email automatically every 15 minutes and listening to the FM radio for an hour used half the battery's charge. With moderate use, the phone should last 2 days on a charge, and 3 to 4 days with light use. Heavy use = nightly charging and EDGE-only extends battery life by 15% or so.

Conclusion

There's a lot to like here, and the phone has been well-received in our offices. It's very good looking, extremely pocketable and slim. With WiFi and GPS, it's a Swiss Army Knife of a phone, and it's hard to beat S60 3rd Edition's speed, features and web browser among smartphones. Were it not for the so-so camera that looks so much better, and the weak RF by Nokia standards, we'd crank the star rating higher.

Pro: Has complete support for US bands, including 3G. The NAM model has a US warranty. Extremely attractive design and quite thin. WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, 3G, FM radio, MP3 player and a 3 megapixel camera-- the phone has all. Nice use of the accelerometer for screen rotation and silencing the phone.

Con: Reception is just average (usually Nokia phones have very, very strong reception). Camera images aren't very good.

Web site: www.nokia.com

Estimated price: $499

Specs: