Brimming With 3G Features
The E60 is brimming with good features but two things let it down. Could the E60 be " A bridge too far" for Nokia to pull off. Well we will let you decide based on our thoughts below.
The
first of the two things let it down, strangely enough, is memory expansion.
There's 64 MB of built-in memory which is quite a healthy amount, and as you
would expect you can expand on it using flash memory cards. None of that is
a problem.
The problem is that the card format is RS-MMC, a format that is very much out of favour. At least the slot is easily accessed on the right hand edge of the casing, and has a protective cover.
The other thing that lets the E60 down somewhat is that it doesn't have a camera. This means no video calling, and no shooting of stills or video. The absence of the camera in a clue that the E60 is primarily destined for the suit pockets of company executives: some companies seem disposed against camera phones. But the range of features in this handset is so good that it might have a much broader appeal.
But we are running ahead of ourselves a little bit. The Nokia E60 is one of four handsets in the E range, and they are all pretty swanky. The E60 runs Symbian S60 3rd Edition. As such it is a fully fledged smartphone and it comes with Nokia's PC Suite software for synchronisation with a PC. You also get the cable to connect the phone and PC together. For anyone thinking of using the Nokia E60 in a company situation the handset supports various third-party synchronisation solutions such as Blackberry Connect.
This is a handset with wireless at its core and so Bluetooth, infrared and Wi-Fi are all here. The Wi-Fi could be particularly useful if you are interested in Voice over IP (VoIP), and we used it with a wireless network for web browsing and picking up e-mail.
Now, Web browsing on a mobile phone is not exactly a new thing. But screens can let the whole browsing experience down with their low resolution and small size.
Not so in this case. The screen here is not particularly big - 55 mm corner to corner, or if you prefer your measurements edge to edge, 36 mm wide and 41 mm tall. But the resolution is excellent at 352 x 416 pixels. What that means is that when Web browsing you get a whole lot more of a Web page on screen than you might do with, say, a 240 x 320 pixel resolution. Very unusually for an S60 phone, you can flick the screen into landscape mode, and the wider format also helps with website viewing.
You can fiddle with the font size too, again helping to get more of a Web page on screen. At its smallest the font is extremely difficult to read. As you travel around a Web page you get a little thumbnail view of it and you can move a red area within the thumbnail around to decide which piece of the page to focus on. If you've looked at several pages in succession, using the back softkey button lets you cycle between them and go directly to the previously viewed one you want to see again.
Moving around like this within the browser and other applications relies on the mini joystick that sits underneath the screen. Now in general we are not big fans of mini joysticks. They can be unresponsive and awkward to use. But this one is really very good and with the Nokia menu key directly beneath it you need absolutely minimal thumb movement to get around.
In fact the general layout and design of the E60 is aimed at those who like clean lines and unfussy design. The numberpad and other keys are all pretty large, and nicely shaped so that they are easy to locate. There are no side buttons on the right edge, with the left one just housing volume controls and a single key that on a short press starts a voice recording and on a long press starts the voice control software.
The E60 is brimming with applications. In a folder called Office are viewers for Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents and a utility with which you can show the contents of the E60’s screen on a data projector. You really could make a presentation from the phone.
The music player is very good and the battery gave us over eight hours of continuous music off a full charge. The Symbian S60 Gallery application is there for you to view images you’ve got onto the device in some way other than shooting them with a camera.
The lack of a camera is probably not going to do the Nokia E60 any favours in the eyes of a potential user who wants everything but the kitchen sink in their handset. But we aren’t sure its absence really matters that much.
If you are the kind of phone user who needs to MMS or is addicted to taking photos of this and that, then you shouldn’t be looking here. But if you want oodles of features, including Wi-Fi, a superb screen, and effective Web browsing, then casting an eye in this direction might be rewarding.
This review covers the above mobile phone only and does not address the performance of any 3G Network. The score is based on a 3G mobile phone checklist.
Copyright : You are advised that this material is the copyright of www.3G.co.uk and is our own personal view only. (C) All rights reserved 2005. Whist every care has been taken in the preparation of this review, the author nor 3G.co.uk cannot be held responsible for the accuracy or authenticity of the information it contains, or consequence arising from it.
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