Nokia E66 Review

Interface:

All models of the E-series use the Symbian OS and the E66 is not an exception. Here you’ll find the 3rd Edition of the S60 interface with Feature Pack 1. The standby screen can look completely simple, or show the Home screen application. We definitely prefer the second mode because it gives you the option to personalize it. Moreover, you gain quick access to the most used features and important information (unread SMS messages, e-mails, upcoming events, etc.) which saves time, and everyone knows in business time is money!

The news here is that you can not only change the shown apps and info, but also switch between two modes. This is possible from the Home screen app, as well as from the settings. By default, their names are Business and Personal, but they can be changed and totally personalized in order to suit your taste. Both of them can use a different ringtone, different on-screen apps, theme and wallpaper. In our view, this improvement is really handy; imagine that you have just left your workplace (Business), you switch to Personal, and your device transforms from a business phone to a beautiful slider, suitable for listening to music via the FM radio.




There are many other fresh improvements in the interface. Let’s begin with the phonebook, which has gone through some cosmetic changes.  When you select a contact from the list, pressing the D-pad to the right will bring up the possible ways for communication (email, SMS, etc.), which is quite a nice solution. Also, the caller groups aren’t shown in the upper part of the screen anymore but rather act as separate contacts, which allows you to send an SMS to chunks of your contact list with just a few clicks. Again, these little changes make a big difference in usability.


The “improvement wave” has passed through the organizer as well, but has affected only the calendar. It no longer takes up the whole screen, when showing all the days of the month. Below the dates you’ll see the upcoming events. In fact, you see only three of them in the beginning, but if you have assigned more, after 2 seconds the list begins to scroll down automatically. The rest of the view types also look a bit different. When you’re in “Day” view, the events are listed in a vertical sequence, divided into hours. There’s also the well-known To-Do view, but now a brand new type is available – Agenda. If you choose this mode, you’ll see all the events for a certain day, sequenced vertically in hours.


OK, the calendar has gone through plastic surgery and the end result is really nice. All the improvements will surely help the business customers quickly and easily organize their time, but let’s put that aside and take a look at the rest of the organizer functions. As we mentioned a few moments ago, they have not been changed and are all well-known from the previous models, running the same OS. The calculator, units converter, file manager, dictionary… it’s all as it used to be and even the novice users will be able to use them without problems.



Software:

And how do you open Office documents, PDF files and presentations? For the Word, Excel and PowerPoint files you use Quickoffice, which opens and edits Office 2003 files flawlessly, but when it comes to Office 2007, the situation is not that simple. If you need to open and edit such files, you’ll have to buy an additional license that costs €54.64 (about $75 USD). In order to view PDFs, the phone is equipped with Adobe Lite 1.5, which handles small and large files as well.