Nokia E66 Cell Phone Review - Multimedia

We've been big fans of Nokia's music software for quite awhile, but we found that it took too long to get a song playing on the E66. Video software isn't as good and Nokia's music store still hasn't launched in the U.S. so you won't be able to buy music over the air yet.

Accessing Music Software (3.08)
It took us an average of 6.5 seconds to get a song playing on the Nokia E66. This is not a very impressive time, you can see below that it's slower than average and amongst our comparison phones only the Nokia N82 performed worse. As the Nokia E66 is a business oriented device there is no shortcut to the music software on the home screen, as such we were forced to delve into the menu to launch the software.

The music software interface is clean and easy to use.

What slowed us down the most, however, was the time the software took to scan your phone for new music files when it launched. If you want to cut this time down we recommend putting a shortcut on the home screen and keeping the music player running in the background, this should make accessing your songs much faster. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

Time to get Music Playing (sec)

Dedicated Music Controls (1.5)
When music is playing the only hardware controls on the Nokia E66 are the volume keys, which do what you would expect them to do. Like most S60 devices you also get a plugin on the home screen that allows you to quickly access your playing music, but we found that on the E66 that there were so many plugins active on the home screen that the music program got knocked off. If you switch modes to personal this changes, or if you go into the settings and turn off some plugins you can see it, but as is we are only awarding half a point for it where normally we would award a single point.

Music Software Functionality and Organization (8.8)
 The Nokia E66 uses the same music software that we've come to know and love on S60 devices. The software supports playlists, including the ability to create and edit playlists on the device. Tags are supported for Mp3, WMA and AAC file types. Music can be sorted by title, artist, album, genre and composer. Album art is supported as long as it's embedded in the file, there is no support for album art saved as a separate file.

A good selection of sorting options for music.

Visualizations are also supported for those who like such things, as is background play and automatic updating of your library. There's also a very good equalizer built in with the ability to create your own presets. Most importantly the software is straightforward, easy to use and powerful. It's amongst the best music software we've seen on a mobile device.

Online Song Downloading (0.0)
The Nokia E66 will support Nokia's music store service when it become available. Unfortunately at the time of this writing that still had not occurred, so no over the air music downloads for users yet.

Streaming (0.0)
The Nokia E66 was unable to play streaming Mp3, AAC or Windows Media audio from our test site.

Podcast Support (7.0)
As is typical of modern S60 devices the Nokia E66 has very good support for podcasts. There is a dedicated application on board that allows you to subscribe, download and organize your podcasts. This application does a very good job, with integration into the music player and support for downloading podcasts on schedule in the background, so for example you can set it up to download all of your podcasts at six am so they are all updated when you walk out the door in the morning. We are very pleased with this support.

Music Sync with PC (7.0)
You can synchronize your music with your Windows computer using Nokia PC Suite or simply via Windows Media Player on the desktop. Synchronizing music with a Mac computer requires that you download and install Nokia's Multimedia Transfer software.

Music Formats and DRM (4.0)
The Nokia E66 is capable of playing MP3, AAC and WMA file types. It supports Microsoft's plays for sure DRM, which is used by a variety of online stores like Napster. It does not support Apple's Fairplay DRM so you won't be able to play music purchased from the iTunes music store. To evangelize a bit, however, we recommend purchasing your music DRM free from a place like Amazon.com and forget the whole DRM business.

Music Interruption (10.0)
The Nokia E66 did a very good job when a call interrupted music playing. The music was paused while you took care of the call and then started up again from the same point when the call was complete.

Video Software Access (3.13)
Getting a video to play took an average of 6.4 seconds in our tests. Like the music software we were forced to delve into the menu system to open the gallery application. From there we went into videos and opened the test file. You can see below that the Nokia E66's performance in this test compares more favorably to its peers than the music startup time did, this is because getting a video playing on a cell phone just takes more time on average than music does. As it is the E66's performance is actually a little better than average and right around the middle of our comparison handsets. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

Time to get Video Playing (sec)

Video Controls (4.0)
Nokia is still using Realplayer for video playback, we can't understand the commitment to this sub-par piece of software, but there it is. The way video controls are arranged is a perfect example of Realplayer's shortcomings. Instead of using the D-Pad to controls play/pause, next/previous, fast forward, rewind and volume up/down like most sensible programs do Realplayer abandons such an approach for one that is redundant, unintuitive and devoid of usefulness. Let's start with play/pause, there's literally three different ways to get a video to stop playing in Realplayer. You can hit the center select key on the D-Pad, hit the right soft key or hit the left soft key.

Why both Pause and Stop?

Left/right on the D-Pad controls volume, as do the volume keys themselves, while up/down does nothing. Up/down is used for fast forward and rewind, yes this is exactly the opposite arrangement that you might expect. Our recommendation, put yourself out of your misery and go get a real video playback application for your phone like Coreplayer.

Video Software & Organization (1.0)
Basically, there is none. That is to say that there is no way to organize your videos built into Realplayer. Nokia probably wants you to use their gallery application to manage your videos, however, and at least there you can create some folders to organize stuff, but don't expect the software to recognize any of the genre or type tags from your videos.

Video Sync with PC (7.0)
As with music you can synchronize videos with your Windows computer using Nokia's PC Suite or Windows Media Player on your computer. Out of the box there's no way to synchronize videos but Nokia's free Multimedia Transfer software will allow you to do this, you'll just have to go download it.

Video Formats (6.0)
The Nokia E66 does support a good selection of video formats. We were able to play back all three of our differently encoded 3GP files, Mpeg-4, H264, Real and Flash video. Not supported was Quicktime and Windows Media.

Video DRM (0.0)
The Nokia E66 does not support any form of DRM protected video.

Video Playback Smoothness (4.0)
Unlike some other recent S60 devices we've reviewed like the N82 the E66 did not do a very good job handling our video clips encoded at increasingly higher bitrates. The N82 was able to play back all five of our test files up to a maximum bitrate of 768 kbps. The E66, by contrast, was only able to play back the two lowest quality files encoded at 56 kbps and 112 kbps. These were H264 encoded files. The difference is likely due to the fact that the more multimedia oriented N82 has hardware video acceleration built in while the business focused E66 does not.

Online Video Downloading (0.0)
The Nokia E66 does not support any services out of the box that allow you to download premium video content to your device.

Video Streaming unscored
Standards for mobile streaming video are all over the place, as such we don't score this section. We do test out a few sites for your further elucidation, however. We are pleased to say that like other modern S60 phones the E66 does support streaming flash video on sites like Youtube.com. We're not talking about Youtube's mobile site here, which is also supported, but their full version site. Just for kicks we decided to try out Hulu.com, but were disappointed to find out that it was not supported. Windowsmedia.com which plays streaming Windows Media video was also not supported. Still, the support for Youtube's flash video, and hopefully other flash video on the web, is huge.