Nokia E66 Cell Phone Review - Battery Life

A combination of a small 1000 mAh battery and use of battery hungry 3G networks conspires to produce poor battery performance on the E66 for both call time and web browsing. Music playback time was excellen, however. For more information about our battery tests see this article.

Call Time (3.74)
We were quite disappointed, albeit not surprised, by the Nokia E66's poor performance in our call time test. It last just over three hours. You can see below that this is quite a bit below average and less than any one of our comparison phones. The E66's poor battery performance in this test is predictable given that it is using AT&T's power hungry 3G network and has a rather small, by smartphone standards, 1000 mAh battery. If you choose to turn off 3G you should get a more respectable talk time, in our tests on previous handsets it usually provides a bump of about one third. Of course you'll also be giving up high speed data and the ability to make calls and browse the web at the same time. Also many users won't know they can or should make this change, so this will likely be the experience of most E66 owners. As it is the Nokia E66's performance in this test indicates a serious flaw with the handset. No matter how many great features you have on a phone once the battery is dead it's just a hunk of plastic and metal.

Call Time (min)

Music Playback (9.90)
Music playback time on the Nokia E66 was very good at thirteen hours forty-five minutes. You can see below that this is way better than average and also beats out every one of our comparison phones. This means you will be able to use the E66 as your primary music device without worrying too much about the impact it will have on battery life for other functions. This is important as the talk time and music playback time on the E66 are so low that anything taken away from them can have a serious impact on the end user.

Music Playback Time (min)

Web Browsing (4.20)
The Nokia E66 lasted for three hours thirty minutes in our web browsing test. This is significantly below average and less than any of our comparison phones. The poor performance in this test is another result of the Nokia E66's use of AT&T's power hungry 3G network and a rather small 1000 mAh battery. As we mentioned above you'll be able to get more battery life if you turn 3G off, but of course that means you'll be using slower EDGE speeds, which top out around 230 kbps, rather than HSDPA speeds, which give you max speeds of 1.4 mbps. The poor performance in this test should give pause to anyone who uses a phone's data connection a lot, including those who get a lot of email.

Web Browsing Time (min)

Idle Time unscored
In order to ensure that we deliver reviews in a timely fashion we don't test idle time. Nokia claims idle time of 264 hours for the E66.