Nokia E65

Nokia's new E-Series range has been designed with business in mind, yet style hasn't been compromised. The slider E65 is a 3G capable smart phone handset that encompasses a sleek and stylish look, together with a range of business features.

Features

Call quality was a mixed bag as we felt volume could have been louder. We also noted that calls weren't as crisp or clear as some other recent mobile phones we've reviewed. The hands-free speakerphone worked quite well, although some unwelcome distortion was noticeable in windy conditions. The E65 supports conference calling and has 3G capabilities. Despite being a business orientated handset, it has a 2 megapixel camera on the rear for photos. Unfortunately though, there is no front mounted VGA camera for video calls. The still camera is fine for a few happy snaps, but don't expect to take any real photography as it suffers from most of the problems synonymous with mobile phone cameras, including image noise, lack of sharpness and poor colour reproduction.

The E65 includes support for SIP (session initiation protocol), which is commonly used for voice over IP (VoIP). This allows the Nokia E65 to connect to SIP networks, such as engin and MyNetPhone, for example. This is a definite advantage for corporate users.We particularly liked the fact that Internet calls appear in the call log menu (marked with a distinctive Internet icon) along with regular mobile calls. The E65 can also hook up to compatible Wi-Fi based Private Branch Exchange (PBX) systems and act as a normal office extension. It supports the same features as your regular office phone when doing so, such as call transfer and four digit dialling.

The E65 has push email capabilities with support for POP3, IMAP4 and SMTP protocols and even includes some third party applications such as Blackberry Connect. This means the E65 can connect to an existing Blackberry enterprise setup. We tested the unit's email application with a standard POP3 Yahoo! account and it worked fairly well. When located in range of a wireless network, the E65 can use native Wi-Fi to retrieve your email, but when you're on the road it uses GPRS. It allows you to retrieve new emails or your entire inbox and you can also view, save and even edit your attachments using the phone's 50MB of internal memory, or the microSD card slot. The E65 supports a range of attachment file formats including JPEG, 3GP, MP3, PPT, DOC, XLS, and PDF files. Nokia also includes a 256MB microSD card in the sales package.

Connectivity is a strong point of the E65. It includes Bluetooth 1.2, infrared, USB, WAP 2.0, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g and GPRS. Nokia includes a USB cable in the sales package for connection to a PC, and this can synchronise emails with Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes. We had no problems connecting to a wireless network and were up and running in a matter of minutes. The E65 can search for wireless access points every one, two, five or 10 minutes and you simply select the network with which you wish to make a connection. Nokia also includes an excellent Web browser that has the ability to scroll through each page with a feature called 'page overview'. This view shows a full Web page shrunk to fit the screen and a selection box is used to navigate to the part of the page you want to view in more detail.

The E65 runs on the Series 60 3rd Edition OS and it is equipped with a full array of smart phone applications, including QuickOffice Word, PowerPoint and Excel document viewers, a host of PIM features (calendar, contacts, to-do list, task list, alarm clock, notes, converter, calculator) and both voice recording and dialling. The handset is also fully compatible with Zip Manager and Adobe Reader and there is support for standard SMS and MMS messaging with T9 predictive text input. Overall, we were pleased with the speed of the E65's interface, although it is a little slow to start up and switching between applications does result in a slight delay.

A new feature exclusive to the E65 is 'Team Suite'. This application is an extension of the phone book and allows users to group a specific list of contacts, with a list of commands alongside them. This allows users to create group messages, make conference-calls with the press of a button, and also use Push to Talk.

Design

The E65 is finished in a chocolate brown and silver design, with chrome edging. It looks more like a fashion phone than a business phone, and we really liked the touch of class Nokia has added. In particular, the slider felt well-built, with a swift and smooth opening action. The phone measures 105mm x 49mm x 15.5mm and weighs 115g, so it's relatively light and compact, considering the features included.

Nokia has added some new one-touch controls to the E65. In addition to the standard controls, which consist of two selection buttons, a five-way navigational pad, answer and end calls keys , as well as dedicated menu and clear buttons, the E65 also includes business keys for conference calling, phonebook and mute. There is also a customisable "own key" that users can program to open any application on the phone they like. The keypad blends well into the rest of the design and we liked the raised centre of each key. The keypad was also quite responsive and we had no problems punching out long SMS messages and emails, achieving excellent speeds in the process. The E65 also has edit, voice record and volume keys located on the right side. Its QVGA display has a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels and support for up to 16 million colours, and is both bright and clear.

Battery life is average according to Nokia figures, rated at up to 2.5 hours of talk time on a 3G network and up to six hours on a standard GSM network. Standby time varies, from up to 14 days (3G) to 11 days (GSM).