Nokia E65

...on my 2 year old Nokia was becoming a joke. So, rather than buy a new battery – I contacted O2 business for an upgrade handset.

After a quick look on the website the Nokia E65 caught my eye – it seemed to have many features and, as this is mainly a business phone, some really useful stuff on board. The price was reasonable (well, free in exchange for another 12 month contract!) and it was duly delivered a few days later.

...cable, 3 different manuals, some Nokia software, headset and a charger adaptor. This phone takes the very small charging pin, so it needs an adaptor (included in the package) to work with older generation Nokia chargers.

As it happens, O2 sent me a proper charger in a separate package– so the enclosed bumpf about “not supplying a charger to reduce our environmental impact” – resulted in two different packages being sent through the ... more

I’m not really a mobile phone snob – as long as I can make and receive calls and send the odd text message I’m ok. Having said that the stand-by time on my 2 year old Nokia was becoming a joke. So, rather than buy a new battery – I contacted O2 business for an upgrade handset.

After a quick look on the website the Nokia E65 caught my eye – it seemed to have many features and, as this is mainly a business phone, some really useful stuff on board. The price was reasonable (well, free in exchange for another 12 month contract!) and it was duly delivered a few days later.

WHAT’S IN THE BOX?

There’s a couple of different versions of the package kicking around, which are either the full retail box or an upgrade version. Both are pretty much the same, apart from the upgrade version doesn’t come with a charger.

You get the phone, battery, a little case / pouch thing, USB cable, 3 different manuals, some Nokia software, headset and a charger adaptor. This phone takes the very small charging pin, so it needs an adaptor (included in the package) to work with older generation Nokia chargers.

As it happens, O2 sent me a proper charger in a separate package– so the enclosed bumpf about “not supplying a charger to reduce our environmental impact” – resulted in two different packages being sent through the post – with roughly twice the packaging…..

Turning it On

It was fairly easy to assemble it for the first time – the instruction booklets were done anyway with and the battery, SIM cards and back cover easily clipped on.

At this point you notice this is actually a quality little product. The plastic on the back is soft-feel and textured, and the front screen is surrounded by a mixture of polished and dull metal. The slide mechanism for the keys also feels substantial – the metal continues below and the whole phone, even when extended, feels good and solid.

As I typed in my pin number for the first time, there was also an almost unquantifiable quality about the feel of the key presses. It’s the sort of difference you’d notice between a Ford Fiesta and a BMW.

The first few screen asked me to enter the time and date and select my nearest city – after this it seemed to take a while to turn on, but it eventually displayed the default screen.

Immediately it felt complicated. I’ve always had Nokia as by and large, they are fairly easy to operate. This seemed more like a Sony Erickson – which to some may be a good thing – but to me it initially felt awkward and clumsy.

FINDING YOUR WAY AROUND

The whole key to the new interface is called “active stand-by”. In plain speak it’s essentially an “Outlook Today” for your phone. It lists the 6 commands in a line (shown as icons) towards the top of the screen and the area underneath can be used for showing calendar, task and message information.

Along the top there’s a small indicator for battery life and signal strength. There’s also a clock (which looks best in analogue mode) and the current date.

At the base of the large screen are the 2 normal Nokia trademark ‘soft keys’ (which basically perform the function shown in the screen just above) and then there’s a selection of other keys. A simple red and green button for starting and ending calls – a “C” button – which is basically a cancel / delete key, and a rather intriguing icon which actually means “main menu”.

But we’re not done with the buttons yet – there’s the 4 way navi-key. This is been standard on Nokia’s for a while – but this one actually seems sorted. The action is smooth and positive and it’s much easier to operate than on any phone I’ve had before.

There are also 4 more buttons (making 15 in total on the front), one for contact, mute, conference call and “my key”. My key is basically a fancy way of saying it’s a shortcut key that you can use to kick start many of the phone’s functions.

On the lower keypad is just a normal telephone keypad which is refreshing simple. On the side there’s buttons for volume and voice recorder and another that doesn’t seem to do anything. Rather annoyingly the feature which meant you could use the side buttons alone to operate the camera (as on many phones) don’t exist here and you can only operate the camera through those of the front panel.

WHAT DOES IT DO?

I’m not going to bore you with a list of features, but suffice to say it has most of the features you’d expect from a normal phone.

It also has the ability to install other applications (either through download or via the enclosed USB cable) to add additional functions. Think of the phone as more of a mini computer and you’re probably closer to the truth.

Sadly though, while computers have got easier to use – this isn’t. The main menu starts off fairly straight forwardly – but then the more advanced commands are stuck in the random sub menus. To change the ring tone, for example, you have to go though 4 different sub menus.

Having said that, once you’ve got to grips with the rather random nature of how it works there’s some good stuff.
The best feature, by far and away, is the wireless network wizard. It essentially allows you to connect to wireless networks (like your home broadband, if you have a more expensive router) so you can play on the internet.

There appears to be 2 web browsers – one is just a simple (and crap) WAP browser and another with is a far more functional tool. Getting the right browser to work over the right network is, again, more trouble than it should be. However, once there it’s quite wonderful.

It means you can look at almost any website on your phone – the screen has a little mouse pointer which you move around using the navi-key. It automatically stops over links and text boxes so it’s probably as easy as it ever could be to use.

The screen also has excellent resolution, so, depending upon your eye sight, you can zoom it right out any see about 50-75% of any web page on the screen at the same time. I also found that it seems to work with most websites and it’s easy to set up and access your own favourite pages, just as you would on your computer.

There are also built in links to download additional software, which obviously ranges from free to very expensive.

Aside from the web browser, there’s also other web-based stuff you can do. There’s “blackberry” software included in the package, as well as Nokia’s own version, to read and reply to emails. Also (and this is the first time I’ve seen it on a mobile) there is software which allows you to open file attachments like word and excel documents. It’ll even read PDF files!

The final piece-de-résistance is the Voice over IP phone. I won’t bore you with what this is – but basically it’s a way to make and receive calls over the internet rather than through your normal phone network. This is made even better by the fact that my company desk phones are all VOIP anyway – so, in theory, I can use this phone, over the company network anywhere that has wireless internet access.

As I said “in theory” owing to the fact I’ve had people trying to get this feature to work for ages; but so far without any joy. I’m still waiting on a guide from our VOIP providers of how we can make this phone work with their system.

WHAT’S NOT SO GOOD?

Aside from the rather overly complex nature of the menu system, there’s also functions which could and should work better.

Take for instance the “Text Reader”. It’s great – you can get it to speak aloud your text messages (which is also very funny, if you were so inclined, to make it say offensive words out loud!). Trouble is in the normal text messaging menu this feature is no-where to be seen. Indeed to access it you have to go trawling through the main menu, into “office” and then start it from there.

If you want to change the setting, you have to go somewhere completely different again.

In fact the feature is so fragmented, as if the people that designed it never spoke to anyone else. This means it ends up being pretty much useless.

The camera is also poor. The image quality is great – but the way it works isn’t. You take a picture and, as with any other digital camera, it freezes what’s on the screen. In most cases that would be your image done, but not here. The actual photo happens about 2 seconds later (by which time your subject had turned away or buggered off). This feature worked perfectly on the old phone so to make a hash of it here is pretty poor.

The phone also lacks a radio, something I didn’t pick up on the time. It’ll play your MP3’s no problem, but if you fancy a bit of Chris Moyles (or even Terry Wogan) on the train; you’ll have to do without.

There are also some flaws in the way it handles contacts. The default way it stores then is “Surname, First Name”. After much exploring the menus I got it to change this to the correct way around. Even so – in the messaging section they are still displayed backwards.

Again with the messages when you are sending a text it asks you to select the recipients – but it doesn’t include a “recently used” group, so you have to go through your entire contacts each time you just want to send a quick message.

Even more annoying if you press, say “S” to jump to the S’s – it’ll show both the ‘Sarah’s’ and the ‘Smiths’ – meaning you still have to sift through too many to get to the person you want.

The software has it fair share of bugs. The phone (especially when on the internet) often throws up random error messages or just shuts itself down completely. It’s rather like the reliability of Windows 98 in mobile format.

This one is probably the most bizarre problem - when you are using the phone your stubble / sideburns seem to get stuck in the front of it. I’ve no idea how – there doesn’t seem anything overly sharp. But anyhow, it still manages to grab hold of your facial hair and pull it out by the root – rather like a facial ‘epi-lady’. I know this isn’t just me, my similarly unshaved colleague has the same problem!

Finally, if the phone is in 3G mode – it takes about 5 attempts just to connect a call. This may just be where I live – but even so there were no error messages – just silence. Eventually I disabled the 3G functions so it now only works on the older GSM network.

SUMMARY

So what we really have here is a great thing that could have been.

It’s well built, feels nice and have some really good features. On the other hand, it’s buggy, poorly though-out and makes simple, everyday, tasks like taking photos and texting more difficult than they should be.

When you throw the reliability issues you are left with the conclusion that unless you really want a portable wireless web browser on your phone – you’re better off elsewhere

Thanks for reading, your comments are always appriciated - Rob 

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