Nokia E66 Cell Phone Review - Software

The Nokia E66 runs the powerful Symbian Series 60 operating system, which is a multi-tasking smart phone operating system that supports native third party applications. The home screen on the device is chock full of information and eminently customizable while the browser is one of the best we've seen on a mobile device.

OS (8.0)
The Nokia E66 run Symbian Series 60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1. That mouthful basically tells us that the E66 runs Nokia's smart phone operating system of choice, but not the most recent version which is Feature Pack 2. Nokia has indicated that they went with a slightly older version of the software to ensure stability, which is an important consideration for an enterprise focused device. Series 60, or S60, is a very mature and powerful operating system.

The E66 will switch to landscape simply by rotating the phone.

Like most modern smart phones the capabilities basically give you a small portable computer in your pocket. Support for multi-tasking allows the E66 to run multiple programs at once and if the phone doesn't already do it you have a large selection of third party application to add functionality. Our biggest issue with S60 is that the interface is often intimidating to new users. In particular the large soft key menus and plethora of shortcuts will take new users quite awhile to get used to. That said, power users will love the customization options and powerful features of the platform. Our score for S60 devices is standardized.

	Above the Work home screen.
	Now the personal home screen

Home Screen Score (8.0)
Nokia's Active Standby screen has been standard on S60 devices for awhile now and like Windows Mobile's Today screen it gives users access to a lot of information and features from the most common screen on the device. The basic layout has not changed significantly on the Nokia E66, but there are a couple of new additions that are worth mention.

Let's start with the basics, on the top of the screen you'll find time, date, network battery and signal indicators. Below this are your application shortcuts in a single row of icons. There's room for six shortcuts here and these can be customized to your own needs. Below that are a series of home screen plugins. By default these include plugins for setting up email. VOIP, calendar, tasks, Wi-Fi and Search, but again these can be customized. At the bottom of the screen are the labels for the soft keys, which once again can be changed.

The new additions to the home screen are an application that allows you to switch between two modes. By default these are Work and Personal, but they can be customized to your needs. Changing the mode will switch the theme, change the home screen shortcuts and plugins. The basic idea is that you can switch between them based on your current needs, so during work you'll be in that mode and when you leave work you can switch the interface. This is a nice feature, but we found that it took a bit too long for the mode switch to happen, so don't expect to be able to constantly switch them up as a way to extend the shortcuts on your home screen.

The second new addition is a shortcut that appears at the bottom of the screen below the plugins when you get a new alert. This looks a bit like the icon for a new voice mail but it appears whenever you have a missed call, voice mail or missed alert. Scroll down the screen to select it and you get a popup of all your missed alerts that you can then browse. We found this to be a nice addition as well, and we hope that both of these end up in all S60 devices in the future.

With the E66, and we expect the E71 as well, Nokia has taken what is already an extremely powerful and flexible home screen and made some small tweaks to improve it even more, that's what we like to see. For those who find the Active Standby screen to be confusing you can switch to a more standard cell phone home screen with four shortcuts assigned to the direction of the D-pad in the settings. But we imagine that business and power users will appreciate all the goodies the Active Standby screen gives you.

Extensibility (8.0)
Series 60 is a full fledge smart phone operating system, which means that the signature feature is support for native third party applications. There are literally thousands of such applications available for the platform, which means that if your phone can't do it already you can bet that there's an application out there that will probably give you the capability. S60 also provides native support for Java applications, simply download and install them and they run just like any other program. This combination makes the E66 one of the more extensible phones out there.

Customizability (8.0)
We spoke ad naseum about the vast customization options for the home screen above. To summarize you can change your application shortcut, change the soft key labels, change your plugins and also switch between two modes. In addition you can assign any photo you want to your home screen background and you can easily change the E66's theme, which change the look and feel of the whole interface. In addition to this you can also change the order of the application in the menu, including the ability to create new folders.

All of this is standard for an S60 device, but one additional customization option on the E66 is the ability to reassign the functions of the shortcut keys around the D-Pad. To do this you'll need to go into Menu - Tools - Settings - General - Personalization - One-touch keys. Once there you can change what the Calendar, Contacts and Messaging do with both a short press and a long press. This is a great addition, something that Windows Mobile devices have been able to do for a long time and that we've been hoping for on S60 devices. This in addition to the other great customization feature on the Nokia E66 make it one of the most customizable devices on the market.

OS Responsiveness (7.0)
As with all recent S60 devices the Nokia E66 has some significant improvements to speed up responsiveness, the most important of which is doubling the RAM from 64 MB to 128 MB. In practice this actually gives you three times the available free RAM so the days of memory errors should be behind you. As an E-Series device the E66 doesn't have some of the fancier hardware acceleration for video content that N-Series devices like the N95 have, you can see the result in our video playback test where the E66 choked on some of our higher bitrate videos.

Nokia have made some interface changes to improve the feel of the interface by adding smother transitions between screens. You'll notice that on the E66 screens seem to fade in rather than changing abruptly. Of course this may have no real impact on the time it take for a screen to load, but it does make it seem faster, which is often just as important. In use we found that most operations on the E66 were speedy, but there were some exceptions to this. We mentioned above that switching modes took a few seconds and launching the music software was also a bit slow.

The fact that the E66 has so much free RAM, however, means that you can often avoid the long load-up times for applications by leaving them running in the background. We recommend doing this with the music application and web browser if you use them a lot. You can easily switch between running applications by pressing and holding the home button.

Browser Features (11.0)
The Nokia E66's Series 60 Web browser is one of the most capable mobile browsers on the market. The browser supports almost all modern web technologies including full HTML pages as well as mobile WAP pages. It also supports Javascript, some Flash content including video, Frames, RSS/Atom feeds, Encryption, Cookies, password management and the ability to save web pages to your device. In terms of technologies supported it is unrivaled by other built-in browsers on mobile devices like the iPhone's Safari or Internet Explorer Mobile on Windows Mobile devices.

The web browser in full screen landscape mode.

Browsing Interface (9.5)
Series 60 Web on the E66 is meant to give users a full desktop browsing experience on their mobile device. This is done by rendering the page as it would appear on your computer's web browser and then using an innovative overview and zoom-in feature called Mini-Map. This allows you to quickly find the content you want and zoom into it easily. S60 Web does a good job reorganizing content on the page a little so that you can view what you want in a single page width. In practice it doesn't work quite as well as the tap to zoom system of Safari on the iPhone, but it comes close.

Series 60 Web allows you to zoom in on what you want and then zoom out to see the whole page.

S60 Web also includes powerful bookmarks and history features. Every site you visit is automatically saved in a special bookmarks folder and it also auto-completes a web address you are typing based on your bookmarks and history. Bookmarks you create can be easily organized into folders. During a browsing session your history can be displayed visually, when you hit the back button you will see a series of thumbnails of the sites you've visited and can easily scroll back to the one you want.

Bookmarks and history in the web browser are both fully featured.

Like most S60 programs the menu system on Web is a little large. When you hit the left soft key menu you get fifteen items at the top level, and seven of those open up sub-menus. This can be a little intimidating and can also be annoying to navigate. Thankfully there are a few keypad shortcuts to help you out a bit. One takes you to your bookmarks, two opens a search bar, three takes you back to the previous page, eight puts you in overview mode so you can move around the site, nine opens a bar to enter a web address while * turns the zoom level up and # turns it down. Learning these will help make using the browser a more pleasant experience.

On older S60 devices that lacked RAM using Web would often lead to memory errors as caching full web pages quickly used up available memory. Thankfully this isn't an issue on the E66 with it's increased RAM and this makes using S60 Web a very pleasant experience and cements its place as one of the better mobile browsers out there.

Browser Access (10.0)
It took us only four steps to go from the home screen unlocked on the Nokia E66 until we had browsed to Wirelessinfo.com. You can see below that this is faster than average and the fastest amongst our comparison phones. From the home screen all we had to do was navigate right to highlight the icon for the browser, press in on the D-Pad to launch it, enter our web address, this is counted a s single step, and then press in on the D-Pad again to browse to the site. We use steps here instead of a timed test because we don't want network issues to play a role.

Steps to Browse to Wirelessinfo.com

Gaming (4.67)
Incredibly the Nokia E66 does not ship with a single full game. This is a shame as we feel that all phones, even business oriented ones, should ship with at least one fun game to help kill time. There are a plethora of games available for the E66, however, including some free ones like Snakes that you can download from Nokia. You can also install Java games on the phone. The D-Pad is very comfortable and responsive, which should make it good for gaming. There's no 3D acceleration on the E66 like there is on some of Nokia's N-Series devices, however, so particularly processor intensive games will take a hit on the E66. There's also no support for Nokia's N-Gage gaming platform.

Calculator (5.0)
The calculator on the Nokia E66 is the same one we've seen on other S60 devices, which is not particularly impressive. The layout eschews the standard form of using the D-Pad to access arithmetic functions. Instead these are arranged as buttons on the right side of the screen that you navigate using the D-Pad and the select by pressing in. There is basic memory support as well as support for percentages and square roots. In addition to the calculator there's also a converter program on the E66 for converting weights and other measures as well as currency.

The calendar is the same old S60 fare.

Alarm (5.0)
The alarm on the E66 is fairly basic, although it is a step up from the extremely simple one alarm every day that we saw on older S60 devices. The E66's alarm allows you to create multiple alarms each of which can have a recurrence pattern of once, daily, weekly, or workdays. We would have liked to see more powerful recurrence options and the ability to set your own alarm tone for each alarm.

Alarms are still fairly basic.

Document Software (7.0)
The Nokia E66 ships with the full version of Quickoffice 4. This suite allows you to view and edit Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents right on the device and does a solid job, although with complicated documents there's always the danger that formatting won't transfer to the desktop or the phone quite right. There is an updated version available, but you will need to pay for it if you want to upgrade. There is also Adobe's PDF software on board for viewing PDF documents.

Quickoffice gives you document editing support.

Other Software (4.0)
There are a plethora of additional programs installed on the Nokia E66, but we only considered a few worthy of additional points. First up is Nokia's VOIP application, which allows you to easily integrate with business VOIP services. The file browser allows you to easily browser through, copy and delete files on the phone, which can often come in handy.

Voip and File Browser can both come in handy.

Nokia's Maps 2.0 gives you mapping, directions and local search for free, voice guided directions will cost you, however. It also integrates with the GPS on the E66, but more on that in the Other Features section. Finally Nokia's search program allows you to find anything on your phone and search online at the same time. There's a handy home screen plugin for this and it comes in very handy.

Nokia's search program lets you look for anything on the phone or online.