Nokia E66 Cell Phone Review - Conclusion

Conclusion
The Nokia E66 is one of two recent additions to Nokia's E-Series lineup of business oriented device, the other is the QWERTY sporting E71. We found the E66 to be a very attractive device, and those looking for an all-in-one device are going to give it a hard look. Running the powerful Symbian Series 60 operating system the E66 is a fully featured smart phone with powerful email, organizer and synchronization capabilities. We found that Nokia made several upgrades to the organizer features that we feel improves them dramatically. The E66 plugs into an Exchange server for push email easily, supports AT&T's 3G network and has a very capable 3.2 megapixel auto-focus camera on board. Oh, and it also has GPS functionality. What's more, not only does it do all these things, it generally does them well and it looks pretty decent doing them.

All of this is great, and we found ourselves liking the E66 a lot as we reviewed it. Unfortunately the phone has a couple of Achilles heels that mar an otherwise excellent impression. First amongst these is battery life. Sporting a relatively small, for a smart phone, 1000 mAh battery the E66 performed very poorly in our talk time and web browsing battery tests. Just over three hours of battery life isn't going to cut it for business users who need their phone to work when they need it. That said, if you're always close to a power supply, or if you're willing to turn off the 3G capabilities, which should boost battery life by about one-third, the E66 is an otherwise very capable phone. But if you're a user who's constantly on the move and uses their phone a lot we'd bet that the E66 won't get your through a full day on a single charge.

The second big stumbling block is price. As Nokia hasn't been able to get a U.S. carrier for the E66 you'll have to buy it unlocked for north of $500 when it becomes available. This automatically puts the device out of reach for many users. If the E66 was available for $100 with contract we might recommend it and suggest investing in a second battery. At $500 we can't recommend a phone with three hours of talk time for most users.

Who's It For

Business User
Business users will love the Nokia E66's capabilities. It plugs into an Exchange environment seamlessly, has excellent organizer features and the email support is solid. The big issue is battery life, most business users need a phone that will get them through one day of hard use, and we don't think the E66 is going to do that unless you turn off the 3G capabilities. Even then we worry about the small battery capacity.

Budget Callers
Over $500 for a cell phone? Not for budget callers.

Chatty Teenager
The E66 does a lot of things chatty teenagers will like such as the very good camera, excellent keypad for texting and very good music playback capabilities. That said the E66 is probably more bang than most teenagers need, and certainly its more buck than most parents will want to spend.

Media Maven
Despite not having some of the multimedia features that Nokia's N-Series lineup has like video acceleration and five megapixel cameras the E66 is still an above average media device. That said if you're willing to pay over $500 for a multimedia phone we recommend you go with the N82 or N95 instead.