Nokia had a pretty amusing definition of a business phone when they launched the Communicator series a long time back. Functionality apart, it was a potent weapon for personal scale destruction. It was so big, huge and stupid that you could threaten people with it, “One shot, Dilbert, and you’re toast”. It resembled a geometry case a kid would take to school and was good if you were an absolute show off; the kind who’d take a Louis Vuitton even to the loo.
But not any more. The new range of E series pitches its tent bang opposite to Sony Ericsson’s P series and the Blackberry’s of this world and today we’ll be taking a look at the E65. (The E61 and E51 will certainly follow. Its just that I haven’t had enough time with the other phones)
Looks, build quality and feel
Nokia seem to have finally got a slider design right. Their other sliders (6270, N80, N95 et al) were rather boring and boxy. I’ll also go so far as to call them phones meant for chimps and orangutans. But not this one.
It looks failry slick and you wont have a problem slipping it into your coat or your jeans pocket. Its nicely rounded off at all the right places and feels nice to hold. Its got just the right size, neither too fat nor so anorexic that it might snap if you so much as travel in public transport.
On the front you see the screen, the light sensor(more on this below) and the navigational keypad. Nokia have done a smart thing here by cramming all the keys here so that the only reason for you to slide the erm… slider will be to punch a number or a message, which has a fairly nice feel, by the way.
Display and Camera
The E65 features a 16M color screen with a native resolution of 240×320 which is pretty readable in any kind of light thanks to the aforementioned image sensor. What this does is, sense the ambient light and automatically change the brightness of the screen to whatever it deems fit. You can control the intensity of this, but be sure to go easy on it, it loves to drink battery juice.
The camera is a 2MP unit and is strictly average. The images produced are fairly noisy and color reproduction is not up to mark. Which makes it good only for casual clicking.
Here are some pictures
Business features
The E series is a business phone and does justice to the tag. It features all sorts of organizing tools despite having Quick Office wherein, sadly, you can only view, not edit, Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF files.
It also has the all the eMail solutions possible like BlackBerry Connect, IntelliSync Wireless mail and a VPN client to access your corporate mail. Another E series exclusive feature is the Nokia Team suite. This allows you create groups of your employees and co-workers. This can be particularly useful to some team leader.
Connectivity
Nokia have left no stone unturned on this front and I’ll just assault your senses with a bevy of 3-4 letter mumbo-jumbo sounding abbrevations. The phone has 3G, UMTS and quadband, Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, VoIP over WLAN, GPRS, EDGE, USB, Infrared and Bluetooth 1.2. They should have considered providing Bluetooth 2.0, but then no phone has everything I want, so, boo.
You also have the option of adding a GPS receiver and use the inbuilt maps application in case you get lost ‘finding that-hottie-in-HR’ on the other wing.
Entertainment
The phone isn’t really meant to handle all this, but it manages to do the job fairly well. It can play MP3’s, AAC, Real Audio, MPEG4 and 3GP videos. The sound through the inbuilt speakers is average.
Performance and battery
This phone is one of those few Nokia phones I have seen which don’t give copious amounts of lag time at everything you do. That can be attributed to the ARM9 processor which runs at 222MHz and eats almost everything you throw at it.
The battery too is stellar and will easily run 2 days without a charge under normal usage. Which is like a hour of talking, a bit of bluetooth socializing, some Wi-fi browsing and a sprinkling of camera usage.
Whats Good
- Good design
- Well built
- Fast enough
- Good battery life
- Lots of connectivity options
- Quadband
Whats Bad
- No Bluetooth 2.0 and A2DP
- No editing documents
- Average camera
- No 2nd video cam for video calls
- Mono headset
Whats in the box?
Handset, charger, mono headset, carrying pouch, user manual, PC Suite
Conclusion: The E series successfully puts up a worthy fight to the other business phones in its price range and while at it, it looks good too.
Price
- India 14,500 to 15,500
- USA $350 to $450
SatishSays dot Com rating 7/10
Tags:
E series,
nokia 
