dailymobile24: Review: Nokia E6 Under the Microscope

Review: Nokia E6 Under the Microscope

The Nokia E6 is the ‘new kid on the block’ and takes first position ahead of the E72, E71 and the E5. It combines the best of the three devices and with it innovations and designs to equip it for today’s market and is dressed in lots of metal to enhance its business appearance. But, do not be fooled by the look, it is a phone that will grace any office be it corporate or social. The E6 can fulfill the requirements of your business, personal and social life. The device arrives with a newly designed keyboard, giving us the return of the nicely sized space bar that had been eroded in some of the previous devices and with better tactile touch and response of the qwerty keys, it is a pleasure to use. The reduction in navigation keys allow for increased aesthetics in the E6 with the d-pad and navigation/select keys clearly clarifying their use without being cluttered or cramped.

The E6 measures: 115.5 x 59 x 10.5 mm

Weight (with battery): 133 g

The E6 is a touch screen device with a real QWERTY keyboard. As such, there are several options and routes to conducting a task. It is mostly left up to the individual how he/she uses the device dependent on the menu that you are navigating or application that you are using. Either option I found easy to use and the only problem occurred with my hesitancy of choice.

The E6 houses on the left side, a USB slot and on the right are volume keys, mute key and lock screen key. The Top of the phone houses the memory card slot, the 3.5 headphone jack and the on/off button. Bottom of the phone is the charging port. The back of the phone houses the speaker and the featured 8.0 megapixel camera with LED flash (more about this later). It comes with a BP-4L battery.

The display in standby is completely black but a quick press of the d-pad keypad reveals a glimpse of your most recent activity such as text messages and a clock with the date and time. You have a physical key to unlock the screen as well as an onscreen unlock option, which I consider a good compromise as I am not keen on the physical lock key. Unlocking the screen reveals the beautiful bright display, which enhances the theme and icons represented on the E6.

Screen size: 2.46″

TFT LCD

Resolution: VGA (640 x 480), pixels per inch: 326ppi

16.7 million colours

On the left side of the display is a list of icons in a vertical bar and in addition, the screen is populated with icons in a horizontal row. There are options to add widgets for your favourites such as email, social networking, TV etc. I have my email and social networking set up in such a way so that I get instant updates on the standby screen and with a short preview of the message and picture of the individual. The E6 has five screens to suit your every mood and situation.

Now that we have had a look at the exterior of the E6 let us take a peek on what it contains under-the-hood.

The E6 comes equipped with five screens to cover your business, social needs and more. Each screen has a multitude of options for you to choose from depending on your preferences and these can be edited to add or remove individual items. Moreover, you can populate the screens with widgets, icons, themes and shortcuts. In addition, you can download further widgets as and when you need. The clock is available for easy usage as is profiles, calendar and email. Touching any of these icons will take you directly into the application. For example, clock will take you into the app to add an alarm; diary will take you to your calendar where you can add appointments or meetings. The display is both touch sensitive as well as being navigable via the d-pad. Network connections, new messages and the time remain on all screens both while navigating and while within applications and menus. Thus, making sure that you can access any new information without having to go back to the home screen or having to exit an application before you can access those functions, this is a nice piece of innovation that will be welcomed by all.

The calendar was populated after my sync with my Gmail account and all my previous and subsequent appointments were easily accessible. No information was lost nor did they contain errors. The sync of my email, contacts and schedule was simply achieved by inputting my Gmail account details on the initial set up of the phone requiring only my email address and my password. The calendar shows at first glance your availability for the day and to the right hand of the screen display, it shows your appointments for the day, if you have any. Numerous tools and options are available to you in calendar from the viewing options of week, day or month, to setting up your meetings with subject, time, location, alarm, whether the appointment is private and much more. Needless to say, the options were near enough exhaustive. In addition, you can make a choice of calendars and choose a different colour to separate the two or more.

Contacts has enough fields of entry to fulfill most requirements: name, address, company, job title, note, additional detail, image, mobile, telephone numbers for home and business, email address, internet phone, video call, voice call, Ovi sync and settings to choose the default for each one. You can decide how you want to view your contacts whether by first or last name and what part of the phone memory you wish to use for storage. In addition, you can create groups for your contacts, for example, family, friends and business colleagues to keep them separate.

The music folder contains your music player, radio, Ovi music for purchases and my beloved Shazam for identifying those tracks when your out and about (Shazam is a downloadable app from the Ovi Store). On start-up, music player automatically searched and identified my music and podcasts and I could instantly play from on-screen my track or album and swipe forward or backwards to the next or previous album or track. This is when the beauty of having a touch screen really establishes itself. You can shuffle music, choose from playing via artist, song, genre, or playlist. You can view the complete song details from formation and duration through to bitrate, size, copyrights and more. The option to change your listening position runs through the equalizer in choosing bass, classical, jazz, pop and rock and setting the loudness volume on or off and on/off for stereo widening. In additional, a favourite track can be easily assigned at this point to a contact. Album art is on view, which makes viewing your tracks as well as listening to your music an artistic reverie. However, there are some quirks in the music player due to the fact, that when you make some changes or decide you do not want to make a change there is no option to go-back a stage so you have to exit the music player app and restart so that you can get back to the beginning stage. Radio works via plugging in the headset, which acts as an aerial. I am not a headset or wired-based sort of a person. I like to use my devices wirelessly so the inbuilt radio has never been something that I was enthralled by. I much prefer the streaming versions but the built-in hardware is available for those of you who use it.

Ovi music is your music-shop. You can see a list of new music, favourites and those recommended as What’s Hot. In addition, you can search for your own artists and make purchase via your Nokia account. It is easy to set one up if you do not already have one. I was rather excited when I saw the caption ‘get unlimited downloads’ but on accessing this I was told ‘you cannot use this mobile for unlimited downloads’. I wish I had not seen it now as I feel as if a gift has been taken away.

Mail was so easy to set up that there is not much that, I can say about it, really. It did what it said on the tin with very little input from myself and just works as it should be! I could say it was sublime but it all happened so quickly, easily, simply and effectively that I am rather lost for words. So…. Moving on quickly, we head to the browser

The Nokia E6 arrives with a brand new browser; we will call it ‘Anna’ as does everyone else. ‘Anna’ is a lady of Class and delivers all that is expected of her with super diligence, clarity, speed, efficiency and workmanship. ‘Anna’ opens a new webpage that is easily negotiable. I must mention here that the font-size used as the default ‘normal’ is nowhere near, what I or anyone else would call ‘normal’. It is more attuned to ‘extra-small’ and I needed to adjust the fonts to ‘large’ to be able to read a webpage without the use of a magnifying glass. This font-size problem does exist quite a bit in the E6 and hopefully an update of firmware will correct this error. I found the new onscreen ‘return/back’ icon and the ‘menu’ icon rather disturbing in Anna’s browser. A similar thing exists on the Palm Pre 2 but I had no problems with it. I think the difference here is that the icons sits on top of a page and therefore blocks out part of the page that you are viewing rather than sitting a little below the page you are viewing so as not to corrupt your viewing space. Again, the size of font used to view the menu is very small but that cannot be adjusted unlike the facility, which exists when viewing a web page. However, that is a minor niggle as the menu icons remain the same, and are static, so you will become used to the layout and position in a short space of time. The function to swipe back a page is a breeze to use and here again the touch facility is at its best. If you dig deeper into the menu you have many settings and options that you can change or manipulate to improve your experience with ‘Anna’, the first of which has to be fonts. And if you are a Google-hater then you may want to change your search provider to Bing for example. Bookmarks were easy to add and create and to re-open from the menu, as was a new browser page. In addition, you can send a webpage you find of interest to a friend via message, email or Bluetooth.

Messaging is now grouped into threaded Conversations. This makes life so much easier and with the addition of viewing a message in threads for example, in Gmail, this makes reading, replying, organizing and deliverance of news an easy option. You have the usual folders of: message, conversation, inbox, sent, draft, outbox, delivery report and more. Smiley’s or emoticons are as always a welcome addition to any social message to bring lightness, feeling and meaning to those social messages. Input settings include: text correction level, number matches and text correction mode. You can easily add recipients or attachments to a message in addition to music clip, video clip, image and sound files.

The E6 has a multitude of settings and preferences to make the E6 ‘your phone’. In addition to profiles, calls and connectivity preferences there are the options of themes and wallpapers as a start to your personalization.

The all new maps is available for download and improves on what is already available with the present check-in, favourite, drive, walk, weather and more online services.

Office leaves no stone unturned. You are set-up with dictionary, file manager and Quick office giving you access to open, edit, create and amend office documents with ease from your phone. As this is an E-Series (Enterprise/Business) device it has a full version of Quick office and in addition you have Adobe reader and F-secure an antivirus application for your phone to keep you virus free for that mammoth amount of work you intend doing.

File manager has several options and usage but for those of you concerned with space and memory it gives you a quick snapshot of your memory capacity across your c-drive, mass memory, and memory card along with options to backup, restore and format.

Accessibility options include a speech, synthesized voice: my phone came with Martin but you can download others.

The E6 has an 8 megapixel camera (full focus) and zoom up to 2x (digital) for still images and shoots 16:9 videos in HD and 4:3 aspect ratio with video capture in 720p 25fps. Before we go into the realms of the Nokia N8, let us suffice with saying that this is not Nokia’s flagship imaging device and therefore should not be regarded as such and should not be compared within the same stratosphere. It does not have the Xenon flash of the N8 or the aging N82 but there have been improvements in the camera since the days of its counterparts the E71, E72 and E5. You can view your images via albums and set up a slide show. Images taken can be shared via Facebook and Twitter and there are additional applications such as Pixel pipe, which allow you to share to other counterparts and other photo-sharing sites such as Flickr. In addition, you can send an image via email, message or Bluetooth.