Nokia E66 Review

Multimedia:

The E66’s media capabilities aren’t vast. It features the standard Symbian music player and FM radio, so using them should not be a problem. The headphones will do a good job, if you want to listen to the news on the radio for example, but you won’t be able to fully enjoy your favorite music – they are not powerful enough and the sound quality is about the average level, far away from the one, offered by the music-oriented phones.


In addition to playing songs and listening to the radio, you’ll be also able to watch H.263 and H.264 encoded videos, but their resolution should not be higher than that of the display. If you want to record videos, on the back is a 3.2-megapixel camera with autofocus and a small LED flash. It has a familiar interface, average quality when shooting outdoors, and a terrible one in artificial lighting conditions. You can use it as a barcode reader, which is an interesting feature that you can use when you’re shopping, in order to identify the product. Unfortunately, it didn’t work on our device and we couldn’t check a single barcode no matter the lighting. Sometimes, the function happened to turn off by itself. All in all, the multimedia qualities of E66 aren’t at all comparable with those of the Samsung INNOV8 for example, but are okay for a business phone.




Connectivity:

The E66 offers a few ways for connection to the global net. It’s up to you to choose whether to connect to the available wireless networks (Wi-Fi) or use fast HSDPA connection. You can use the Symbian browser no matter the connection type. As in previous Symbian S60 models from Nokia, we didn’t experience any trouble with it.  We managed to open all kinds of pages, they rendered properly, and navigating was quick and easy.


Besides connecting to the web you’ll eventually need to establish a local connection with other devices, for example with a laptop. This may happen also in several ways – via cable, in this case there are different modes; via Bluetooth 2.0; via Infrared – there aren’t many phones today that support this feature. In this aspect even the most pretentious users cannot complain.


GPS:

Nokia’s E66 offers a built-in A-GPS, which should help you navigate through cities or states that you’re unfamiliar with while either driving or using your feet. It worked flawlessly and even when it was cloudy the warm start was almost immediate (about 3-4 seconds). It uses Nokia Maps, which we’ve seen and discussed many times, so we’ll be brief with this one. Its interface is easy to get accustomed to, and the maps can be downloaded via a computer or directly from the phone. Moreover, it comes with a 3 month free license for turn-by-turn navigation, as in all latest models from Nokia, featuring a built-in GPS.