Nokia E66 Cell Phone Review - Hardware

We were quite pleased at how fast we were able to type on the Nokia E66's keypad. The 2.4 inch display did a good job in bright light and we were happy to see support for high capacity memory cards. The D-Pad on the E66 was very good, but we had some concerns about the other buttons on the device. We do like that you can reassign some of the button functions, however.

Text Words Per Minute (9.44)
We were able to type a very impressive  47.2 words per minute (wpm) on the Nokia E66's keypad using two hands with predictive text turned on. This is very impressive for a phone without a QWERTY keyboard, you can see below that its significantly above average and amongst our comparison phones only the Blackjack II performed better.

The keypad is comfortable to use except for the lip at the bottom.

We found the keypad on the E66 to be very responsive. The keys are well differentiated with good key travel and a satisfying click when pressed. This is in sharp contrast to the terrible keypad we saw on the Nokia N82. We did feel the keypad was a little small, and in particular our fingers seemed to bump into the lip at the bottom of the keypad a little too much. Those with larger finger might find it a little annoying, but those with nimble fingers should find it fairly comfortable. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

Words Per Minute

T9 and Auto Complete (5.0)
The Nokia E66 supports T9 predictive text entry but does not support word completion.

One-Handed Typing (8.94)
We know that many people like to type out a quick message with a single hand so we do our words per minute (WPM) test again, but this time using only a single hand. We were able to manage another impressive score of 44.7 WPM with a single hand, only slightly slower than we were able to manage with two hands. You can see below that this is way above average, and in particular you will note that the gap between one-handed and two-handed typing is much better on the Nokia E66 with its keypad than on QWERTY devices like the Centro or the Pearl. This is one of the bonuses of having a keypad versus a keyboard on a phone, the latter is much harder to type on one-handed. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

Words Per Minute

Keypad Backlighting (6.0)
The Nokia E66's keypad is backlit with a white light that illuminates both the numbers and symbols on the numbers. We did detect a little bit of unevenness in the back lighting as numbers on the edges seemed slightly less illuminated than those at the center of the keypad, but this was a minor issue. The keypad using the same brightness and time-out settings as the display. There is no light sensor to control how bright the keypad gets or when it goes on or off, it goes on automatically when you open the keypad and when it goes off you'll need to hit a button to turn it back on.

	Nokia E66 controls dark.
	Nokia E66 controls lit.

D-Pad/Joystick (8.0)
The D-Pad on the Nokia E66 is a little on the small size, which worried us at first as we've seen very bad small D-Pads on Nokia phones like the N95. We were pleasantly surprised to find that the D-Pad is very responsive and comfortable to use. There is a raised ridge around the edges to control the four directions, and we found the D-Pad was just big enough that there were no mistaken presses. The way it's raised up also means there were no mistaken presses to surrounding buttons, despite the fact that the controls are tightly packed together. The center select button takes up the center of the control and is large and easy to hit, but sits far enough below the four way control that once again we had no mistaken presses. This is an excellent design and we were very happy to see it.

Touch Screen (0.0)
The Nokia E66 does not have a touch screen.

Jog Dial (0.0)
The Nokia E66 does not have a traditional jog dial, and it doesn't support Nokia's Navi Wheel technology that allows you to run your finger along the edges of the D-Pad to scroll up and down.

Soft Buttons (5.0)
The Nokia E66's soft buttons sit just beneath the display to the left and right of the D-pad and application buttons. We have some issues with the buttons on the E66 as they are packed very closely together and are not very well differentiated. For those with larger fingers especially this can lead to mistaken presses. We also found ourselves having to reach just a bit farther than we would have liked to press the soft keys. When pressed they have reasonable key travel, but not very much tactile feedback, nowhere near as good as the D-Pad or the keypad. Despite these drawbacks we found that the soft buttons weren't that bad in normal use, they're not great, but they won't make you pull your hair out.

Volume Control (2.0)
The volume controls on the Nokia E66 are terrible. There are two buttons found near the top of the right side of the phone and are separated by the dedicated voice command button. This button is completely superfluous, for reasons we spell out in the Organizer section, and the result is that where you would expect to find two buttons you have three instead, which may be confusing. On top of the bad arrangement the buttons themselves are difficult to press, with almost no key travel and absolutely no tactile feedback. The top one is worse than the bottom one, which may indicate some wear, but the bottom one isn't good either. Either way it's very easy to wonder if you've actually hit the button. We are not happy with the volume keys on the E66.

Power and Standby (4.0)
The power button on the Nokia E66 is located on the top of the device and sits on the lower part of the flip. The button is bright red and slightly recessed to avoid mistaken presses, which is good, you don't want to hit your power key accidentally. What isn't so good is that since it sits on the lower part of the slide when the phone is open it's very difficult to access. This might not matter so much for power, but it also brings up the quick menu to change profiles and this is just annoying.

Other Buttons (9.0)
In addition to the controls discussed above the Nokia E66 has a plethora of additional buttons. Five of these buttons are arranged around the D-Pad. The home or menu button sits at the top left and will be familiar to users of S60. Hit it once to go to the main applications menu and hit it again to go to the home screen. One small change that we like is that if you are in an application and you hit the button it will go directly to the home screen. On previous devices it would go to the menu first and you had to hit it again to go to the home screen. We think this new arrangement makes more sense. You can also bring up a list of all running applications with a long press on the home button.

Just below the home button is a dedicated calendar button. Hit it once to launch the calendar and hold it down to create a new calendar appointment. On the opposite side of the D-pad are the contacts and messaging buttons. The contacts button will open your contacts with a single press and create a new contact with a press and hold. The messaging button will take you to your email with a single press and will create a new email message with a long press. The great thing about the calendar, contacts and messaging button is that you can reassign both the single press and press and hold functions on all of them. So if you want quick access to music, or you want SMS instead of email you can easily arrange this. This is an excellent feature that we haven't seen on S60 devices before and we're very happy about.

Below the D-Pad sits the back or clear button. This is used as a backspace when typing and will also delete the selected item in many places in the interface, for example in messaging, contacts, etc. The only other button on the Nokia E66 is the dedicated voice command button found between the volume keys on the right side of the phone. This button is almost completely useless since all it does is replicate the function that a press and hold on the right soft key will accomplish. It makes the volume keys more difficult to use and it can't be reassigned. As such we are not awarding any points for it.

Primary Screen Gross Resolution (8.0)
The Nokia E66's display is QVGA, 240 pixels by 320 pixels. We know some people are starting to clamor for VGA displays on cell phones, but when you're talking about a display this small QVGA is more than sufficient to give you the detail you need and it's much easier on the battery. On nice new feature of the display is that there is an accelerometer built into the phone so if you rotate it the display will rotate too, like the iPhone. If you find this annoying you can turn it off in settings.

Primary Screen Pixels per Inch (8.34)
Pixels per inch (PPI) is a measure of how tightly pixels are packed into the display. The Nokia E66's PPI is 166.7, which as you can see below is fairly standard. Pixel density is important because if its too low you will get a washed out display with pixelation. The E66's pixel density is quite good enough for most uses, however.

Pixels Per Inch

Screen Physical Size (6.0)
The Nokia E66's display measures 2.4 inches diagonal, which is a good sized display for a cell phone. Sure we could ask of the Nokia N95 8GB's 2.8 inch display, but for the vast majority of uses 2.4 inches will feel comfortable. Certainly it's significantly larger than the 2 - 2.2 inch displays that are standard on many phones.

Inches Diagonal

Screen Brightness (6.65)
To test how bright a screen can get we point the phone's browser at a blank white page and turn the brightness up to maximum. We then use a lux meter to measure how bright it gets. The Nokia E66 measures 68 lux in our test, which is a little below average. You might want to take this with a grain of salt, however, as the E66 seems to automatically adjust the brightness so in a dark room it may turn the brightness down a little. You also have manual brightness controls on the E66 with five levels and the ability to set how long the screen will stay on before turning itself off.

Brightness in Lux

Screen Bright Light Performance (7.5)
We were quite pleased with how the Nokia E66's display performed in bright light. For this test we shine 3000 lux of light on the display, adjust it so we get the most glare possible and then judge how legible the display is. The E66's display was quite readable, we were able to make out all the icons on the home screen and had no problem moving about. This means you should be able to use the E66 even in very sunny situations.

Color Depth (10.0)
Like most high end Nokia devices the E66's screen is capable of displaying an impressive sixteen million colors. This means than when dealing with multimedia like photos and video you should get vibrant and accurate colors on the display. You can see below that the only other phone to match the E66's color depth is another Nokia, the N82.

Power & Data Ports (4.0)
The Nokia E66 uses a standard Micro USB port for data connections. Micro USB is the next generation of the Mini USB standard, and you will see it on more and more phones in the future. We are very happy when manufacturers use standardized ports so although we don't give Micro USB quite the same score as Mini USB, just because it's not as widespread yet, it gets a significantly higher score than a proprietary plug. Speaking of which Nokia is still using their proprietary charging port, which seems silly to us since Micro USB is quite capable of charging the device as well as transferring data. Get rid of the extra port Nokia and move to the standard completely.

Headphone Compatibility (6.0)
The Nokia E66 has a standard 2.5mm headphone jack located on the left side of the phone near the top. We're not particularly fond of the placement, we like to see headphone jacks on the top or bottom, but we do like the use of a standardized port, even if a 3.5mm jack would have been better. For those who like to eschew wires the E66 also supports wireless stereo Bluetooth headphones via the A2DP and AVRCP profiles, although this will have an impact on your battery life.

Internal Storage (1.0)
The Nokia E66 has 110 MB of internal memory, more than enough to cover all of your PIM needs and you'll even be able to store quite a bit of email and attachments on the device. If you want to load up a lot of multimedia, however, you'll want to invest in a memory card.

Expansion Slot & Format (6.5)
The Nokia E66 supports Micro SDHC cards, which currently top out at 8GB but will be available at even higher capacities in the future. This means that investing in a reasonably sized memory card will give you more than enough storage to keep tons of multimedia content on the device. The card slot is not very convenient, however, as its located underneath the battery cover near the top left. Once you get the cover off the slot is spring loaded, but having to take it off is an annoyance that we don't appreciate.

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