e65 with 512mb and 50mb internal memory

The Nokia E65 has more useful features than I can count on my hands and toes combined, and that is no easy feat for a cellphone. Wireless LAN, bluetooth, 3G, connection groups, secure mail retrieval, native Voice-Over-IP capabilities (including SIP), instant messaging client, 2 mega-pixel digital camera, bluetooth GPS connectivity, office suite including PDF reader and unzipping program, micro SD card slot, voice menu and message reader, native VPN client. The list goes on and on.

Crisp, clear screen

The first thing that you'll notice about the Nokia E65 is the large screen. Active-matrix QVGA at 320x240 pixels displaying up to 16 million colours. Impressive for a handheld device, even more so for a cellphone. Crisp, clear and bright.

The next thing that is very apparent when looking at the Nokia E65 is both the lack of buttons, and yet, abundance of buttons. The phone being a slide phone, one would expect to have a large portion of the phone's buttons to be hidden on the sliding part. The Nokia E65 hides only the standard keypad (0-9, star and hash) on the sliding part, and the rest of the buttons (another 10 buttons not including the 5-way middle NaviKey) are on the face of the phone. This allows for the phone to be used with the slide closed a lot of the time, except for
times, naturally, where the keypad is required, such as texting and filling in forms on a web-form.

Customise info on your display

Unlocking the phone is by either a keypress combination, or simply sliding the phone open. This can be irritating at times, as the sliding mechanism is not very resistant,
so simply placing the phone in your pocket could make it slide enough to unlock the keypad, leading to rather unfortunate phone calls to the first person in your contacts address book.

As is usual with the later S60 3rd Edition operating system, the standby screen has a series of items that are customisable, and has the ability to show an amount of items from selected mailboxes on your phone (SMS inbox and/or pop/imap mailbox), calendaring events, and any wireless access points by the WLAN scanning client. An abundance of information on a single standby screen, very useful indeed.

Unfortunately I did not have the opportunity to play with a bluetooth GPS module, but the Nokia E65 comes with navigator and landmark applications to make use of the GPS module. The same goes for the VPN support on the phone, requiring VPN policies and policy servers, none of which were available for testing.

One very useful feature I found was the connection grouping feature, where you can prioritise your home and/or office wireless access point higher than, say, a 3G or GPRS data connection. This allows the phone to use the access points for connectivity for VOIP and/or any other data application (mail, MMS, 3rd party applications) before paid-for connections like 3G and GPRS.

This makes the phone a viable walk-about VOIP phone. Especially with 3rd party applications such as fring (www.fring.com), which supports not only Skype, but also SIP, Google Talk and MSN Messenger. With the S60 3rd Edition's multitasking, fring can always be running in the background connected to the office Wireless Access Point.

And within all these great and wonderful features, you will find the Nokia E65's greatest weakpoint. Poor battery life. Standby time is quoted to be 7 to 11 days when on a GSM network only, and to a lesser 4 to 5 days when on both a GSM and a WLAN network. In reality, when
using the phone's plentiful features, you will find yourself charging the phone every 2 days. One other feature that a phone as feature-rich as this one is missing, is a full keyboard. Even though there really is no space for a full keyboard, it feels like it is missing. Filling in webforms, text instant messages and sending SMSes all get rather tedious to do on a standard 10-button keypad.

Overview

As a whole, the Nokia E65 is a big winner. If you can overlook the need to charge the phone more often than is necessary, and you can live with having a smartphone without a full keyboard, there's really nothing this phone doesn't have. The phone is solid, has a great display, large amounts of useful features, and doesn't weigh a ton.

Add to that the already impressive array of usual Nokia features, and you have a great business phone.

Pros: Connection grouping, wireless, solid build quality, built-in IM and VOIP