Nokia E63 review: E for Economy

Organizer

Time-management is another business phone virtue. Little wonder, Nokia E63 has one of the most elaborate organizer packages we've seen. There are a lot of nice applications, all very user-friendly and functional.

Nokia E63 is currently the only Nokia smartphone to come with a free one-year subscription to the new Files on Ovi service. The service seamlessly syncs chosen folders on your desktop PC to the Ovi web cloud using a small desktop utility and then you can access those files straight from the phone hassle-free no matter whether your PC is on or off.

The organizer trip however starts with the calendar. It has four different types of view - to-do, weekly, daily and agenda as well as four types of events available for setting up - Meeting, Memo, Anniversary and To-do. The agenda view modes is new to Nokia handsets and is really nice - it allows the dates of the month and the events for the selected day to appear simultaneously on the screen. Every event has its own unique fields, some of which allow an alarm to be activated at a preset time to act as a reminder.

The calendar view modes and the events available for setting up

Mobile office is also duly covered, with seamless handling of Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. Furthermore, unlike most other Nokia handsets out there, editing documents is supported right out of the box. With Nokia E63 you won't need to pay extra for editing your office documents.

There is still a number of updates for the Quickoffice that come for a price but most users can do just fine without them. The ones that use MS Office 2007 documents however won't be so lucky as the support for those doesn't come included and they will have to purchase the next version of the application.

Editing a doc and an xls file with the built-in Quickoffice

A PDF reader is also part of the Nokia E63 preinstalled content and a ZIP manager allows extracting archived files straight from your phone.

The PDF reader is also here

The other pre-bundled organizing and time-management applications are: a great unit converter, calculator and voice recorder, as well as the Notes application. We are not going to get into detail with them, as their functionality and performance are familiar enough. The ActiveNotes application is also on board allowing multimedia content to be added to your notes.

The calculator, converter and ActiveNotes applications

The Nokia E63 alarm clock application is also very nice. It allows a huge number of alarms to be set, each with its own name, set-off time and repeat pattern.

The alarm clock gives a lot of room for customization

The printer application enables printing content straight from your Nokia E63.

You don't need a computer to pair your E63 with a printer

The useful "Search" application is also present in Nokia E63. Its reserved line in the active stand-by menu no longer comes as a surprise. After all, an application this useful really deserves to be conveniently placed. The application itself finds almost every item in your Nokia based on a given keyword. From messages to settings, every bit of data is checked and results are then listed.

The Search application

GPS or not, you can always make use of the preinstalled Nokia Maps 2.0 application. It has really detailed map coverage of a huge number of countries and a lot of extras such as traffic information, voice-guided navigation and so on. Unluckily, the extra features need to be purchased separately. Without connected GPS device you can still use the software to browse the maps.

Finally, Nokia E63 features a dictionary. English comes pre-installed but you can also download dozens of other languages for free from the Nokia website.

The built-in dictionary

Unfortunately, the Nokia E63 doesn't have any games preinstalled probably to keep the price down.

Final words

Whether you call Nokia E63 the economy package - or stimulus package, in the jargon of the day - you're looking at a capable business device. It brings the essential skills of the E71, and only sacrifices looks to round off that sweetly trimmed price tag. The lacking GPS comes closest to but still can't be a definite no-go. Even without it, the E63 is a strong enough offer to consider.

Besides, the E63 is not all about downgrading the E71. Whether Nokia want to expand the reach of their Enterprise lineup just like they do with the Nseries, or try to secure some mass demand for a truly elaborate and capable device like the E71, the result looks worth it and we are sure it will get as popular as E51.