Nokia E6

Page 1: Introduction, Features, Productivity

Nokia’s massive sales in India have also been governed by the sales of the E-series range of phones. Without doubt there are quite a few takers in India for these business-centric phones. The E6 is the latest in the line of E-series phones and is a touch-and-type phone which means that apart from the QWERTY keypad, the E6 also sports a capacitive touchscreen.

It is interesting to note that in the mobile phone scenario today, the E6 may be faced with a tough task of pleasing people who are veering towards the ‘Android’ experience. Let us see whether the E6 holds its own among the competition and manages to impress us!

Features

The Nokia E6 is QWERTY-cum-touchscreen phone with features that can rival any smart phone in the same price range. The phone has the standard 2.46-inch display but has a great resolution of 640x480 pixels which means the DPI of the screen is similar to the iPhone 4. The E6 has a screen which can display 16M colours.

Nokia E6 is one of the first phones to ship with Symbian Anna, the successor to Symbian^3. Its hardware specs are impressive. It has a 680 MHz ARM 11 processor, 2D/3D Graphics hardware Accelerator with OpenVG1.1 and OpenGL ES 2.0, 256MB of RAM and it has 8GB internal memory plus microSD slot expandable upto 32GB. For connectivity the E6 supports Wi-Fi, 3G and GPS.

The Nokia E6 has a fixed-focus 8MP camera with dual-LED flash that can also record 720p videos at 25fps. The media player can playback MP4,H.264,H.263,RV,MP3,WMA,WAV,RA,eAAC+ files.

Multimedia is taken care of by a 8MP fixed focus camera with an LED flash that can also record 720p videos at 25fps, a front VGA camera and a media player that can playback MP4, H.264, H.263 and WMV videos and MP3, WMA, WAV and eAAC audio files. The Nokia E6 comes pre-installed with a bunch of interesting apps and you can always get more apps from the Ovi Store. Nokia has also pre-bundled the premium version of Joikusoft which turns your device into a hotspot device.

Productivity

The experience on the new and improved mailbox, courtesy Symbian Anna, is better than the previous version on Symbian^3. The glaring difference is the stability that the new mailbox brings to the E-series. It is definitely not as great as the Blackberry but I can safely say that my Gmail and Microsoft Exchange server accounts synced without any hassles over Wi-Fi/3G and even GPRS for that matter. I received the mails in an instant.

The E6 has pre-installed Quick-Office which is a standard feature of the E-series phones. It lets you create/edit Word Docs, Excel Sheets and PowerPoint Presentations. On the small screen of the E6 it is a little difficult to edit documents on the fly because of some alignment issues and it is a little irritating that you need to constantly scroll through the document while editing. However, Nokia has perfected the touch with this device and compared to the E7 it is much better.

My rant about Nokia’s obsession with fixed-focus cameras continues with the E6.

The E6's bundled hands-free headset is similar to the one provided on the higher-end E7 and it does the job well. It has really good voice-quality and the length is adequate. The headset has built-in controls to accept/reject calls, which is great although an added volume control module would also have been well received.