Review by Michael Primero 

Table of Contents 

1. Introduction / First Impressions
2. Physical Design
General Design Notes
Slide Form and Operation
Screen
Colours
Phone Control
Front Controls
Numeric Keypad
Side Controls
3. Main Operational Features
Telephony
Handsfree Speaker
Connectivity
Speed & Memory
Standby Screen
Audio & Video Play
Camera and Video Record
Mail
Applications
Battery
4.Conclusion
Pros and Cons

Manufacturer's Specifications
Additional Specifications

1. Introduction / First Impressions

The E65 is another feature filled member of Nokia’s Enterprise/E-Series. All of the Nokia E Series phones share in common the Symbian 60 3^rd Edition operating system (now at version 9.1), as well as similar levels of functionality. The main way that the models diverge is by way of form factor. The E65 is the first slider format phone to appear within the E Series range, and it stands in stark contrast to phones such as the E90, 61 or even 70, as it is one of the tiniest smartphones available. Similar to other E series units, the E65 is a quad band 3G phone with massive connectivity options and a great deal of versatility.

If you have read Which Smartphone’s E61 review, then be prepared for some deja vu, as the E65 is a lot of what the E61 is. If reciting a list of E61 features is enough to bring an editor to fatigue, then the E65 is not far behind—the same task with the E65 is also likely to result in a few cramps of the tongue. The differences between the two phones are mainly the plainly obvious ones: no QWERTY full keyboard in the E65, a significant change in form and about half the size of the E61. By way of another comparison, it has a similar footprint to the compact Nokia 5500 Sport, but in a thinner package. The E65 could be thought of as the ‘kid sister’ to bigger E Series siblings, with a tiny package that still packs a major punch.

2. Physical Design

General Design Notes

Due to its appearance and size, people not familiar with this model will probably think that the E65 is a feature phone—albeit a damned good looking one. The geek form factor with this phone is non-existent. At 105 x 49 x 15.5 mm (and just 74cc volume) the E65 is the smallest yet of the Symbian Series 60 units, and one of the smallest smartphones around, period. It also represents a significant reduction in size over the first generation E series 60.

The elegant and compact design of the E65 has ensured Nokia a popularity of the handset well outside of the corporate user market (the characteristic target of the E series). Australian carriers are reporting this model selling like the proverbial hotcake, and it’s not too difficult to guess why.

e65 Vs e61

The E65 has a large QVGA 240 x 320 pixel LCD TFT screen that, like the other E series phones, has a 16 million colour rendering capability. Compared with, say, a monoblock like the E61 or a brick like the E90, the screen is of course physically smaller, and yet it loses nothing in resolution to the E61. This is quite a good achievement, given the relative reduction in phone size of the E65.

e65 Vs Samsung i320N

Not having a full QWERTY keyboard (like the E70, E61(/62) or E90) the phone is somewhat more limited in SMS/email and office document editing terms, but it has some great features for voice operation, and with its extended telephony features such as SIP – VoIP and Wi-Fi support, it will fit in well into many corporate roles where the users’ data entry isn’t that high a priority—perhaps (dare I say it) for those further up the hierarchy. Many users requiring the PDA functions will be more than happy with the predictive text, given the excellent numeric keyboard on this phone. Aftermarket software for Symbian S60 3^rd such as Quickwrite can also provide an itap like function, and to steal a quote from our own M600i review:

One of the main differences between iTap and T9 is that iTap is able to complete words, phrases or even full sentences. T9 is unable to guess a word until the user has typed out a number of letters equal to the full word length. iTap will guess the best match based upon a built in dictionary, including words sharing the typed prefix. This dictionary also contains phrases and commonly used sentences. This way the predictive guesses iTap offers are enhanced based upon context of the word that is being typed.

Even though this feature appears to be extremely useful, iTap is considered harder to learn than T9 due to this extra guesswork. Additionally, it may be required to scroll through several more words than you would have with T9 because iTap will attempt to complete the word. Example: car and card.

I set the two systems to task with a few random words (generated by the ultimate random word generator, my wife) and she threw a few doozeys at me. Amongst the non-profane ones was the word “incubation”, which of course took ten keystrokes with the T9, but fifteen with the Quickwrite. Despite this negative test result for the itap method, some users do swear that they find such systems to be useful. If you aren’t a walking thesaurus or Oxford Concise, then perhaps you will find that such software can enhance text input on a numeric pad. Personally I dislike word completion (even on a touchscreen) and find T9 perfectly adequate.

Slide Form and Operation

E65 made in Finland

The weight balance of the whole phone is perfectly centred when the phone is closed and—also quite perfectly—its weight distribution moves a little lower on the hand when the slide is open. The overall weight of the E65 lends to the quality feel, and at 115g it belies the small volume of the unit.

e65 auto keypad lock

e65 rear texture in mocca variant

The back of the phone (the battery cover area) has a pressed leather effect and has great grip. The sides are made of a similar high friction matt plastic material that (as already noted) feels rubbery. It all adds to the nice feel of the ergonomically accurate form of the phone within your hand.

Screen

The screen is a large and clear 240x320 pixel, portrait orientated, 16 million colour depth TFT. Like other high-end E and N series Nokia phones, this type of screen is excellent for viewing in direct sunlight (as long as you don’t choose the wrong theme). The result of all of these specs in practice is that the screen is crystal clear and a joy to view. Nokia has implemented the light sensor for auto adjustment of the screen intensity dependent upon ambient light levels. Like other Nokia screens this phone continues the single gripe that I have with Nokia displays, which is that they can’t be turned down to very low light levels.  Such a feature is particularly useful so that you can read in really dark areas and not be dazzled (or dazzle others) with the phone screen. Turning the screen to minimum setting does substantially reduce the light, but it simply needs to go lower for dark conditions—a feature other manufacturers seem to have not missed. All in all though, the Nokia screens advantages still outweigh this minor detraction.

Heavy finger pressure on the screen does not lead to the same sort of deformation (not permanent, thankfully) of the LCD elements that can be seen on some other phones, such as the N73 or SE M600i/W950i… which leads me to believe that it is a little tougher than those products.

Colours.

Silver highlights team with Black, Red or Brown (Moccha). The red colour is a little more intense and metallic than that of the Nokia N73 in red, and it makes for a very pleasant look on this phone. Those after more subtlety will be satisfied with either of the dark variants. They all look good to me.

Phone Control

Front Controls

e65 front keypad controls

The Conference key and the functionality behind it is one clear aspect of the E65 that distinguishes this as a business device. With this button you easily start conference calls either by using a dedicated service number and DTMF tones, or by easily selecting contacts from the database by marking a checkbox in the contact list (a network dependent feature). This will no doubt be very useful in many corporate environments.

Numeric Keypad

e65 keypad

Side Controls

The Edit button is located on the right hand side, and it is a little small and fiddly to get to as it is somewhat recessed, narrow and wedged between the up control button and the voice record/voice call button. This is the only button on the right that suffers from this, as the up/down buttons underneath the edit key are raised, and the upper record/voice call shortcut button is at the very top of this small key bank, so there is enough finger or thumb entry space so as to not induce collision with other keys. The left hand side is unusually absent of all controls (the N73 shares this styling feature) and the only other side control is the top power switch, which is on the highly curved top-front surface—which is almost not classifiable as on a side of the device. This power switch accesses the normal Nokia profile switching, power and lock functions as on other Nokia devices.

 

3. Main Operational Features

 

Telephony

In typical Nokia style, the unit is nice and clear—and loud—for both reception and transmission. The consistent well known weak spot (for UMTS) had this phone performing as well as the best phones that have come through Which Smartphone. Like others in the E series this is a quad band unit (eGSM 850/900/1800/1900) for low-grief international roaming. Voice dialling is made easy by a long press of the upper left side button (a short press accesses the voice recorder). The speech recognition needs no programming and it performed very well, both in matching up to the contact and the rapid dialling of the number.

 

Handsfree Speaker

The handsfree speakerphone is not up to the standard of the multispeaker N series devices, but then it couldn’t be expected to be, with the typically small speaker element. The true test of capability here is to size it up next to the little audio killer known as the Nokia 5500 Sport, which has a small speaker element but very good performance. I can hold the 5500 six inches from the front of my face and, with a loud track, turn it up until it causes pain in the eardrums. This kind of volume is often necessary in mildly noisy environments for handsfree talking, if the phone at a distance of a couple of feet (read: avoid getting booked whilst driving). The results for the E65? Very similar… the Sport seems a little brighter at the same equalisation settings, but that is probably just some internal filter settings. So the two phones are likely to be comprised of very similar circuitry and elements for this function.

 

Connectivity

802.11b/g (54 MBps) Wi-Fi with VoIP over LAN (and WEP-WPA-WPA2), Bluetooth 1.2, GPRS and EDGE, USB 2.0 and WDCMA 3G. Mail support for all the push services and POP3, IMAP4, SMTP, and SMS/MMS, and there is also an infrared port sneaked away on the back panel of the top part of the phone (visible as a dark square horizontal rectangle) when the slide is open. This is a particularly functional spot if you choose to use any of the third party software that duplicates conventional remote controls, so as to control PC or audio/multimedia devices via infrared.  

e65 hidden infrared port

And (to use a Bushism) the infrared port is not so ‘uglificatory’ in this spot. As noted at the beginning of this review, the Bluetooth is only 1.2, with no ADTP. Bluetoothing an average three minute audio track phone to phone (I used a N73) will claim about forty seconds of your life (and no, that was not meant to be a recording artists’ association position statement). A micro SD / Transflash card slot is included that is easily accessible as soon as the rear battery cover is slid off, which is just as well as it’s hot swappable.

 

Speed & Memory

The speed of the unit is virtually the same as other Symbian 60 3^rd Ed. devices. (The CPU is an ARM 9, 208 MHz.) Once the device is booted, it is quite rapid at operating with most applications, and multitasks very well. Smartmovie will play (properly recorded video files) at full 320x240 without any delay. Fast graphics rich games like Gamesoft Massive Snowboarding render fast and unproblematically. F-Secure or other anti-virus programs will put a damper on proceedings, and they are probably not very useful given the protected nature of the S60 3^rd OS anyway. Some java apps can be quite slow to boot, but usually roll along quite happily once they are in the program. Interestingly, I found one user programmed open source theme that slowed down menu access significantly, even though it was not a large source file, and didn’t replace icons. The lesson being that this has to be watched for when dumping simple web resources onto any smartphone, as it just may not be all that “simple”.

Multitasking, even with many apps and using major applications, did not show any problems. As something of a torture test, I simultaneously loaded the anti-virus, the services browser (connected to the web), ran and played a music track on LCG Jukebox, loaded the graphics intensive Need for Speed game, as well as a 1600x1200 pixel gallery image and a calculator program, and they all operated together. The music played continually without more than a momentary stop when accessing a new application, and could play in the background whilst playing the game (it slowed down a little, but was still fast enough for me to remain unco-ordinated at). Hence there isn’t going to be much you can do that will slow this phone down, unless you are specifically trying for that result (or, alternatively, if you really do need to get away from your phone for a while).

The E65 comes with a reasonably generous 256 Mb micro SD / transflash memory card, which is apparently only a benefit extended to Nokia Asia Pacific customers. Of course more memory will still be necessary for anyone that is serious about playing audio or video (or holding other data in the phone at any quantity). I recently purchased a 2 gigabyte micro SD card in Sydney for less than AU $40 (June 2007), and so at these kinds of prices, memory probably isn’t a big issue for most potential E65 owners.

 

Standby Screen

e65 standby screen

A very useful improvement over earlier E series firmwares lies in the control to be had over the active standby screen, where ‘plug-ins’ can now be enabled and disabled. This will be a great service to the business user, or for anyone who uses a lot of the phone’s functionality. There is room for six standby icons across the width of the portrait format screen, and below that you can choose to enable or disable the display of notifications (as active standby or pop-up messages) for missed calls, emails, SMS/MMS’es, Voice Messages, and Organiser and To-Do events. The WLAN can also be accessed as well as the music player. In short, it’s a very heavily featured standby / idle screen, and now similar to the excellent idle screen on the Symbian UIQ 3 interfaces.

 

 

Audio & Video Play

Nokia E65 pop-port base

Ready? Real Audio 7/8/10, MP3/4, AMR, M4A, (SP-)MIDI (48 polys), (e)AAC(+), Mobile XMF and Truetones (WB-AMR) are supported. The audio performance of this phone is quite good, and with a decent set of headphones it will satisfy. Repeatedly swapping a HS-31 between the E61 and N73 multimedia phone resulted in little perceptible difference between the two, with the E65 perhaps offering a little more in the way of sheer volume as well as less preset equalisation settings. Once again the evil Nokia pop-port raises its head as the only headphone interface, and users will have to contend with a pop-port adapter if they want to use industry standard 2.5/3.5mm audio jack equipped headsets.

As already mentioned above, speed is not an issue for movie viewing, and video plays flawlessly with either the bundled real player or with the aftermarket software Smartmovie which was tested on the device. Streaming video through 3G is a bit network dependent but 3 Australia provided a seamless experience in portrait as well as landscape/full screen modes via the inbuilt Realplayer.

 

Camera and Video Record

e65 camera sample shot

nokia e65 camera lens

The N65 has a two megapixel (1600x1200 pixel) camera and a 288x352 pixel 15fps video facility. There is some good control over the features of the camera and video (self-timer, digital zoom, image and res. control, etc.) but as with most smartphones this is not too serious a camera or video in quality, and can’t match up to a dedicated unit or the latest Nokia N-Series offerings. It’s good for grabbing quick picks for your contacts list if you use something like Full-Screen Caller, or for wallpaper. If you are quick, it might also serve well for that impromptu video capture of the old guy in the almost-as-old Volvo slowly reversing into your car when the light turns green—bring it out for the police when he says he can’t remember, and thinks you drove into his rear end.

 

Mail

There is an emphasis on email across the E series and the E65 does not disappoint, supporting all the major push email services as well as the standard POP/IMAP boxes. Being able to set POP and IMAP checks to five minute intervals can be roughly as effective as push, but of course will take its toll on your battery. The lack of QWERTY means this phone is not as well suited to composing emails as the E61, E70 or E90, but as already mentioned the numeric keyboard is very good indeed and will certainly please the rapid T9er who needs to write as well as read email (if RSI has not yet set in). Email is another plug-in for the standby screen and doubles as a quick access to the mail program too, if there is an unread message to be displayed.

 

Applications

browsing with the E65

Only Quickoffice read version is supplied with the phone, which emphasises this device’s intended audience as biased towards a more gentle need for data-entry. However that will not stop the zealous author, and the program (version 3.8.5.0 on the review phone) actually internally allows the user to connect through to upgrade the version to get editing capability, via a new Quickmanager tab. Alternatively you could put in an application like Mobi-Systems Office Suite to edit .docs and sheets. There is also a zip manager, phone search facility and Adobe reader. Nokia Teams is also present as is a Wi-Fi search that is accessible as a standby screen plug-in option. There is also a nice introductory tutorial.

 

 

Battery

The battery is a 950 mAh BL-5F. It is specified by the manufacturer as lasting for;

• Talk Time GSM: 180- 360 minutes and WCDMA: 90- 150 minutes
• Standby Time GSM: Up to 7 - 11 days and WCDMA Up to 8 - 14 days

The practical testing of three R65 units saw the phones typically last for;

• Only 1.5 days with little telephone use but heavy use of features such as audio, the office applications and WCDMA browsing/video streaming.
• A day’s use with heavy telephone usage
• Three days with light telephone usage.

Battery performance will vary substantially depending upon what features you use, such as how you have network, wireless and bluetooth set up.

 

4. Conclusion

We at Which Smartphone? feel that the E65 is going to be popular to an extent way beyond it’s initial target market of "Enterprise" users, simply because its looks, size and quality are so appealing. It doesn’t take a geek to be impressed with the beautiful 16M colour VGA screen, and we can’t say a bad word about the numeric keypad (contrastingly, some manufacturers have made simply atrocious keypads: from what we have seen though, Nokia is not one of them). For the geek, although it’s not a full keyboard it has full features and will run just about anything that you care to put on it, and run it well.

 

But perhaps actions speak louder than words. After weighing up the present smartphone marketplace in totality, this editor just had to buy one for personal use, even though I am still smitten with my E61. The E65 just wouldn’t let me go without it.

Nokia E 65

Pros and Cons

Pros 

Small
Powerful
Fast
Quad Band
Good build quality
Tactile, High Friction Surface Grip
Excellent Slide
Wi-Fi 802.11b/g
Excellent QVGA 240x320 screen
Heavily detailed, customisable standby screen
Great keypad
Good Audio
Good looking, good colours
Offers great control from the front of the device
Own Key programmable
Good conferencing ability
No-fuss accurate voice control

 
Cons

Not immense battery life
No full keyboard for Enterprise Users
Another mediocre smartphone camera/video
Difficult to think of E65 Cons

 

 

 

 

Manufacturer Specifications

Slider format smartphone, 3G Business class
Standard numeric keyboard only
QVGA TFT-display, 240x320 pixel, 16M colours,
Wi-Fi and 2MP module
50 MB of internal memory, microSD memory expansion

• General features
  • Announced in Australia: (TBA)
    
  • eGSM 850/900/1800/1900, UMTS
  • Battery type 1000 mAh Li-Ion
  • Battery life:
  • talk mode up to 6 hours
  • standby mode up to 265 hours
  • High-contrast screen, up to 16М colours (TFT), resolution 240x320 pixels
  • 5D navigational button
  • Symbian OS Series 60 3rd edition, Feature Pack 1
  • Weight: 115 grams
  • Dimensions: 105 x 49 x 15.5 mm

• Memory
  • 50 MB of memory dynamically shared amongst phonebook, calendar, messages, images and applications
  • Expansion connector for microSD
  • Assign a photo to numbers in the phonebook
  • Name entry & data, unlimited number of fields.
  • Unlimited number of user groups, assign a single meta-name to several groups
  • SIM-card notes and phone memory not viewable at the same time
  • No limit on Call lists number of entries
  • Type of call specified with date and duration
  • Set a storage period for calls in the list (default 1 month)

• Call management, ringing tones
  • Vibrates
  • Supports polyphonic call tones, True Tones, supported formats AAC, eAAC+, MP3, RealAudio, WAV
  • Support for mp3, AAC, WAV, NB-AMR, WB-AMR
  • Voice dial independent of pronounciation (no need for preliminary tag recording)
  • Speakerphone
  • Assign specific tones to phonebook names

• SMS
  • Т9 predictive text input
  • Customisable message templates
  • Send and receive graphic messages
  • Concatenated messages

• Camera
  • 2.0 MP 1280x960 pixels integrated camera
  • Video clip recording with MPEG4/Н.263, CIF resolution
  • Digital zoom
  • Timer
  • Effects (black and white, negative, sepia)

• Connectivity
  • WAP 2.0
  • Bluetooth v.1.2
  • IrDA
  • GPRS class 10
  • EDGE (Class B, Multislot class 10)
  • Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, VoIP over WLAN
  • Support for HTML, xHTML, cHTML
  • E-mail protocols: SMTP, POP3, IMAP4
  • MMS
  • Synchronization with PC
  • SyncML
  • SMIL
  • USB 2.0 via Pop-Port
  • Instant Messaging

• Organizer and extras
  • 5 user profiles and temporary profile
  • Time, date
  • Calculator, currency converter
  • Stopwatch
  • Countdown timer
  • Organizer supports multiple event types, reminders
  • To-do list
  • Dictaphone (can record phone conversations)
  • 3GPP Video Streaming
  • RealOne Player: RealMedia and 3GPP-compatible files
  • Photoalbum - advanced gallery
  • Application displays MS Word, MS PowerPoint, MS Excel
  • MP3 player
  • Support for MIDP JavaTM (2.0)
  • Games

 

 

Additional Manufacturer’s Specifications: E65

 

OMA DRM delivery method:	HTTP Download MMS OMA Download
OMA DRM level:	OMA DRM Forward Lock
WLAN support:	802.11b/g WPA WPA2 (AES/TKIP)
audio feature:	Audio Equalizer Audio Recorder AMR Audio Streaming Music Player
audio format:	AAC AAC+ AMR (NB-AMR) M4A MIDI Tones (poly 48) MP3 MP4 Mobile XMF RealAudio 7,8,10 SP-MIDI True tones (WB-AMR) eAAC+
bits per pixel:	24
bluetooth profile:	BIP DUN FTP GAP GOEP HFP HID OPP SAP SPP
browser:	HTML over TCP/IP S60 OSS Browser WAP 2.0 XHTML over TCP/IP
camera digital zoom:	4 x
camera feature:	Self Timer
camera image format:	JPEG/Exif
camera resolution height:	1200 px
camera resolution width:	1600 px
camera video format:	H.263 MPEG-4
camera video frame rate:	15 fps
camera video resolution height:	288 px
camera video resolution width:	352 px
camera video zoom:	4 x
data bearer:	CSD EGPRS GPRS HSCSD WCDMA
developer platform:	S60 3rd Edition
document format:	Excel PDF Powerpoint Word Zip
email protocol:	IMAP4 POP3 SMTP
extra feature:	Handsfree Speaker MP3 Ringtones PoC (Push-to-talk over Cellular) Presence SyncML Themes VoIP
flash lite:	Flash Lite 1.1
graphics format:	BMP GIF87a GIF89a JPEG JPEG 2000 PNG WBMP
java API:	CLDC 1.1 JSR 120 Wireless Messaging API JSR 135 Mobile Media API JSR 172 Web Services API JSR 177 Security and Trust Services API JSR 179 Location API JSR 180 SIP API JSR 184 Mobile 3D Graphics API JSR 185 JTWI JSR 205 Wireless Messaging API JSR 75 FileConnection and PIM API JSR 82 Bluetooth API MIDP 2.0 Nokia UI API
length:	105 mm
local connectivity:	Bluetooth Bluetooth 1.2 Infrared USB USB Mass Storage WLAN
maximum memory card size:	2 GB
maximum user memory:	50 MB
memory card:	Micro SD
memory card feature:	Hot Swap
messaging:	IM MMS+SMIL SMS
navigation key:	2 Labeled Soft Keys 5-way Scrolling Side Key Mat
operating band:	GSM 1800 GSM 1900 GSM 850 GSM 900 WCDMA 2100
operating system:	Symbian OS v9.1
power management:	2.0mm Charger Connector
region:	Africa Asia-Pacific Europe Latin America Middle East
root certificate:	Symbian A Symbian B Symbian C Symbian D UTI Root
screen height:	320 px
screen width:	240 px
thickness:	15.5 mm
unlimited heap size:	true
unlimited jar size:	true
video feature:	Video Call Video Player Video Recorder Video Ringtones Video Sharing Video Streaming
video format:	3GPP formats (H.263) MPEG-4 RealVideo 7,8,9/10
weight:	115 g
width:	49 mm

 

The availability of the product and its features depends on regional availability and service providers. Please contact your service provider and your Nokia dealer for further information. These specifications are subject to change without notice.