Nokia E66 Cell Phone Review - Making/Receiving Calls

Dialing a number on the E66 was pretty fast, especially when you consider that you have to slide the phone open first. The call management features were good, but we found the ring volume to be too low and the vibrate alert too weak.

Dialing Speed (6.06)
It took us an average of 3.3 seconds to dial a number on the Nokia E66. You can see below that this is faster than average, which is nice to see given that you have to slide the phone open, but not as fast when you look at our comparison phones where only the Palm Centro was slower. We found the buttons on the E66's keypad to be responsive, but we did find our fingers bumping into the lip just below the keypad a little too much, which led to an occasional error in dialing.

Predictive dialing, finally!

A nice feature that has been added to with the E66 is that as you dial a number or type out a name on the home screen, even using predctive text, it will automatically match to your contacts. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

Dialing Speed (sec)

Send and End Buttons (5.0)
The send and end buttons on the E66 are located along the bottom of the control keys with the dedicated clear key sitting between them. This makes the convenient to access from the keypad, when it's showing, but when the phone is closed being so close to the bottom of the phone makes them a bit awkward to access. The buttons give you a reassuring click when pressed, with good key travel and tactile feedback. Differentiation from the surrounding buttons isn't as good, however, so mistaken key presses are probably going to happen.

Call Management (8.0)
You can access your basic call history from the home screen on the Nokia E66 by hitting the send key. This gives you a list of all your dialed calls. You can also see missed and received calls by moving to other tabs using left/right on the D-Pad. For more information you will need to go into the menu and choose the Log. Here you can see call timers and packet data in addition to recent calls. There's also a log of every call or data transfer made on the phone. This is a good selection of features, our only annoyance is that you can't see all of your calls in one place, you have to choose between dialed, missed and received.

We wish there was a tab for all calls, but call timers are good to see.

During a call the right soft key is assigned to toggling the loudspeaker on or off while the left soft key opens an Options menu. From this menu you can mute, hold, dial a new number, conference and switch to a video call (where supported). There's no support for recording a call, but this is about the only feature missing. As a multi-tasking phone you can also access just about any program on the phone while you are on a call. If you are using the 3G network this includes browsing the internet while you are talking on the phone.

Startup to Call (3.26)
The Nokia E66 took an average of 30.72 seconds to start up and make a call. This is slightly better than average, which is good for a smart phone , which often take a lot longer to start up as you can see with the Palm Centro and Blackjack II below. It's not as good as the N82, which may be the result of the N82 running a slightly newer version of Symbian Series 60. It's also not as fast as the BlackBerry Pearl or the LG enV2. Thirty seconds is a long time to wait for a phone to start up, but it could be worse. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

Startup to Call (sec)

Ring Volume (8.69)
To test ring volume we set the volume to maximum and run through all the ring tones on the phone. We use a sound pressure meter to measure loudness in decibels. The Nokia E66 measures a maximum volume of 86.9 decibels. You can see below that this is below average and the worst score amongst our comparison phones. This is worrying, especially for a business device where you might be getting important phone calls that you can't afford to miss. As it is we wouldn't bet that you'll be able to hear your phone ring in a moderately loud environment.

Decibels

Ring tones (8.0)
We were very pleased to see that the E66 allows you to use any music file on the phone as a ring tone. This means you can have your own custom ring tones without having to pay through the nose for them, as you do when you have to purchase them from a carrier. You can also use your own voice recordings as ring tones, but you cannot edit music or other sounds on the device.

Non Audio Alerts (5.5)
The Nokia E66's vibrate alert didn't impress us much. Although we could feel it in our pants pocket, this was only after a couple of vibrations. If you're being jostled you may not notice it at all. The screen does start flashing when a call comes in so if you happen to be looking at the phone you'll probably catch the call.