A Web-browsing wizard and e-mail chameleon, the Nokia E62 is poised to become a top handheld when it comes to U.S. consumers later this fall. And if what I’ve been hearing about the price is correct, it should be pretty easy on the wallet as well.
I spent a week with a buggy prerelease model of the E62. (Five ROM revisions passed while I was testing it, according to Nokia.) Even in its prototype state, the E62 had a tremendous amount going for it. It’s a big, flat slab that looks like a cross between an old-school BlackBerry and a Motorola Q redesigned by Saab. The 2.8-inch screen is absolutely gorgeous with a 320-by-240 resolution. Below the screen are four slightly confusing soft keys, menu and e-mail buttons, and a very usable joystick. This isn’t a touch-screen device, so you’ll be using that joystick a lot, but it’s a joy to use.
The E62’s keyboard is big, with square, rubbery, responsive keys. You’ll find a power button near the top of the handset and volume and voice-record buttons on the device’s side. Unfortunately, there’s no camera or visible memory card slot. The E62 does accept MicroSD memory cards to supplement its 90MB of internal storage, but you have to open the case and slip them under the battery. That is annoying.
The E62 runs the latest version of the Symbian operating system, version 9.1, with the Series 60 version 3 interface. If you’ve ever used a Symbian device, you’ll immediately feel the difference. The E62 is much quicker and more responsive than previous Symbian-based phones such as the Nokia 9300 and 7610. The Symbian OS is tremendously popular overseas, and it has a thriving ecosystem of third-party software. Although most of these applications were written for earlier versions of Series 60, updates for the E62 already exist.
Symbian’s flexibility shows up in the E62’s excellent e-mail, Web, and document-reading capabilities. Nokia’s own browser is the most desktop-like of any mobile Web browser I’ve used. It’s even able to handle difficult, JavaScript-laden pages such as the sidestep.com travel site. (It doesn’t support Java applets or embedded Flash, but, hey, this is a handheld.) The only thing missing is a one-column view—you almost always have to horizontal-scroll to read whole pages. Fortunately, the excellent Opera Mobile browser is also available for the E62, and it has a dandy no-scrolling mode.
The E62 comes with a POP3/IMAP e-mail program that handles attachments, but the smartphone also works with a dizzying array of push-mail software, including GoodLink, Intellisync, Visto, DataViz RoadSync for Microsoft Exchange servers, Consilient’s new push-POP/IMAP mail solution, and even BlackBerry Connect. Unbelievably, I loaded Consilient’s and GoodLink’s clients simultaneously without any problems. Consilient’s software is very basic—no attachment support or formatting—but it does push mail from POP and IMAP accounts and is very affordable ($5/month). GoodLink works much as it does on other platforms, including full integration with Microsoft Outlook e-mails, contacts, tasks, and notes.
The E62 comes with Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint viewer/editors that handle even Word tables, complex PowerPoint presentations, and multiworksheet Excel documents, although they do take a long time to open. I also managed to max out the 32MB of program memory with two e-mail clients and a 25-slide PowerPoint presentation running concurrently.
One problem that will certainly turn off some e-mail addicts: Neither GoodLink nor Consilient alert you to new messages or calendar items from the device’s home screen. BlackBerry and Intellisync do, making those solutions potentially more usable.
Battery life is always a concern when using push e-mail devices. My E62 clocked in at almost exactly 24 hours running both GoodLink continuously and Consilient intermittently. That’s on a par with what I’ve seen from Treos and Windows Mobile devices, but not as good as BlackBerrys. Talk time without GoodLink running, however, was an impressive 11 hours 12 minutes.
The E62 syncs with PCs via Nokia’s PC Suite software, a Microsoft Windows program (sorry, no Mac version) that has gotten slicker with time but still isn’t quite up to the standards of, say, Palm Desktop. PC Suite does sync contacts and calendars with Outlook and Notes and lets you convert and transfer music files onto your phone. You can also use the E62’s mass-storage mode to make the phone appear as a hard drive on your desktop, and drag and drop files. Unlike with Palm Desktop and Microsoft’s Windows Media Player, though, there’s no easy way to reformat video to play on the device’s video player, a big multimedia minus.
Of course, the E62 is also a phone, too. As a quad-band world phone with EDGE data, it gets solid reception. Both the earpiece and the speakerphone are quite loud, and sound is very sharp and clear, with a pleasing, trebly bias. The slab-like design puts the microphone quite far away from your mouth, though, letting in too much background and wind noise for my taste. Using a Bluetooth or wired headset improved transmissions—and it also got around that this big-slab phone isn’t very comfortable to hold up to your head. Speaker-independent voice dialing works over Bluetooth, but isn’t as accurate as the Voice Signal solution seen on some other phones.
The E62 supports a very wide range of Bluetooth functions, including headsets, stereo music playback, file transfer, dial-up networking, printing, and PC connectivity. Unfortunately, the prototype’s Bluetooth was pretty buggy. For example, remote-control functions didn’t work with my Plantronics Pulsar 590a headphones, and the phone had trouble pairing with a Jabra a320s Bluetooth dongle on a PC. With a Plantronics Voyager 510 headset, Bluetooth range was pretty good—rock-solid at 15 feet, just fine at 30, and staticky but usable at 45.
The E62 should stack up well against its smartphone competition. Depending on which carriers pick it up, it will go up against the BlackBerry 8700c and 8700g, Palm Treo 650 and T-Mobile MDA/Cingular 8125 as QWERTY phones on a GSM carrier. Inevitably, it’s also going to be compared with Verizon’s Motorola Q. The E62 is a far better voice phone than either the MDA or 8125. It also has a higher-res screen and a better Web browser than the Treo, and more multimedia options and available third-party software than the BlackBerry, although the BlackBerry does a better job for individuals who want to merge Exchange, POP3, and/or Yahoo! mail in one place. The Q has easier PC sync options, but the E62 will attract people who don’t want to align themselves entirely with a Microsoft ecosystem.
In short, at a compelling price (I’ve heard as low as Rs 9500 with service), the Nokia E62 could be a killer handheld.
