Nokia E65 The Perfect

The E65 comes in two colour schemes. Mine was brown – Nokia calls it Mocca – and silver. The alternative is red and silver. The brown parts are made of a rubbery substance which makes the E65 easy to grip. I don’t like the leather-look stipple on the back, but that is just a matter of personal taste.It is the only one of the three that looks like a traditional mobile. It is a slider handset, and alongside the capable S60 operating system, it sports a couple of speciality turns for business users.On the software side we have Nokia's Team Suite. This is basically groups management software. You set up groups and can then send e-mails, texts and MMSs to the whole group at once, view Web pages that relate to them and initiate conference calls with them.This is a slider handset. I feel sliders should be very small when closed, and at 105mm tall and 49mm wide, the E65 is not that much smaller than a standard candybar phone. At 15.5mm it’s not that thin either, though its 115g of weight is acceptable.The conference calling bit is also covered by a hardware feature. One of the many buttons on the front of the casing is dedicated to conference calling.


There is no thumbgrip for sliding the phone open, which means that you are forced either to put a thumb mark on the screen or press the edge of the large central select button of the navigation pad. Neither is a perfect solution.A very important aspect of the Nokia E65 is built-in Wi-Fi. This is increasingly common on handsets and smartphones, and in Nokia's E series handsets it is a staple. But this time around there is a twist. You can get the phone to search for networks in the vicinity at regular intervals and report its findings on the main screen. Or you can manually search for networks by selecting an option on the screen. Once you've found a network and are connected, Voice over IP calls and Web browsing are a couple of button presses away.The E65 comes with PC connectivity software and a USB cable, and battery life checked in at around 10 hours of non-stop MP3 music with the screen forced to stay on. It doesn't last as long when the Wi-Fi is active, though.This all adds up to a phone which is pretty nifty, but there are a couple of let-downs.

Features:

Conference calling, voice recording, notepad, integrated handsfree speaker, talking ringtones, and Nokia Team Suite,SMS, MMS with distribution lists, instant messages, and email,One Touch keys for conference calls, mute/unmute, and contacts,Quad-band coverage on up to five continents,802.11b/g integrated Wi-fi,
Symbian S60 3rd edition,2.0 megapixel camera, with video recording (CIF) at up to 30 fps MPEG-4,Available in Mocca Brown, Red, lavender pink and perrywinkle blue.

Operating frequency:Quad-band: EGSM 850/900/1800/1900,W-CDMA 2100,Voice over IP (VoIP) calls via integrated WLAN (IEEE 802.11g and 802.11b standards).

Size:Volume: 74 cc,Weight: 115 g,Dimensions: 105 x 49 x 15.5 mm.

Display:Active-matrix QVGA color display (240 x 320 pixels) with color support for up to 16 million colors,Display contrast and brightness control,Display size 2,2in (5,6 cm).

User interface:S60 3rd Edition, built on the Symbian operating system,One Touch keys for mute/unmute, contacts, and conference calling,Five-way Nokia NaviTM key with two customizable soft keys, power key that can be used as profile key, and My Own key,S60 edit key located on the side of the device,Volume keys on the side of the device.


Imaging:Photograph of Villa Park taken by the Nokia E65.Take snapshots with the 2 megapixel camera (no built-in flash).

Messaging:Read email with attachments: supports POP/IMAP, SMTP, and IMAP4 with idle protocols,Instant messaging client (OMA IMPS 1.2),Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS, ver. 1.2) for text, voice clips, video clips, and still images,SMS and MMS with distribution lists,Predictive text input T9.

Multimedia:Video and audio streaming (3GPP & Real Media),Music player (MP3/AAC) and media player,Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) digital rights management (DRM) 1.0 with forward lock.

Memory functions:Up to 65 MB user memory,MicroSD memory card support (up to 2GB maximum size).

Applications:Java?MIDP 2.0-based games and applications,Attachment viewers for documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.

Connectivity:Dual Transfer Mode (MSC 9),Bluetooth 1.2 wireless technology,Pop-Port connector,IrDA with transfer rate up to 115 kbit/s,WiFi

Browsing:HTML Nokia browser,XHTMtack).

Data transfer:EGPRS multi-slot class 32 for 5 + 3 (receive + transmit) timeslots (up to 6 timeslots total for maximum download speeds of up to 296 kbit/s),Multi-slot class 32 is also supported with GPRS for a maximum downlink rate of 67 kbit/s,Remote and local (peer-to-peer) synchronization of calendar, contacts, notes and to-do list via Bluetooth technology, IR, or USB connectivity cable.


The Nokia E65 smart phone boasts a beautiful and compact slider design, and features a 2-megapixel camera, e-mail, and productivity apps. It also offers good call quality and solid talk time battery life, and has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.

But the E65 doesn't support document editing out of the box, and the lack of a full QWERTY keyboard makes it less than ideal for e-mail. It's occasionally slow, and there's no flash for the camera. The front and side navigation controls are also small and hard to use. There's no support for U.S. 3G networks.

The E65 is brilliantly built and has specifications that blow most other slider phones away. It is unfortunate that the keypad sometimes fails to register key presses. Otherwise, the E65 would have been perfect. All the connectivity options, push email capabilities, and a great browser in a small and slim good looking slider makes the entire package too sweet to resist. This is one phone that I have no hesitation in giving a Highly Recommended rating. If slider phones are your thing, you can't go wrong with the E65. You will just have to get used to its keypad, but this is a minor annoyance when compared to all its positives.

Price (USD) $307.88 approx