Nokia E66 review: Clean-cut business tool

Video player

Nokia E66 features a Real player for playing your video clips. The video player works in both portrait and landscape modes, and allows switching to fullscreen.

With a screen of this size watching a video fullscreen is quite an enjoyable experience. The softkey functions are hidden, so they don't stand in the way and picture quality is good enough, so - a good general mark for Nokia E66 here.

Watching videos is a nice experience too

FM radio

Nokia E66 features an FM radio too, to compliment its multimedia capabilities. It lacks RDS but the proprietary Nokia Visual radio partially makes up for that. If allowed to, it can download all the local stations and save them to the handset with their names. The bad part about it is that it cannot use a Wi-Fi connection but only network-based data transfers.

The visual radio interface

Image gallery

The gallery of Nokia E66 has a decently functional image gallery allowing you to do almost anything with your photos. It offers less (or more likely almost none) of the Nseries eye-candy but that isn't that much of a bother.

You can easily browse images and zoom in up to 8x. Both portrait and landscape modes are available when browsing photos. In addition, the whole browsing and zooming thing is really fast and even comparably large files aren't causing much delay. We have seen even better in some Nokias but this is a business handset we are talking about and we are more than happy with its speed.

Looking at a picture in portrait and landscape modes • zooming in

However the nice slide show with customizable settings, including playing a pre-defined track from your library, is mysteriously gone leaving you with manual browsing only.

The gallery also offers smooth file-management functionality. Still, with the state-of-the-art file manager on Symbian you are not likely to need it.

The file manager can do it all

Underwhelming 3 megapixel camera

The camera is one element where Nokia E66 really fails to impress. The 3 megapixel resolution, the LED flash and the self-portrait mirror might seem appealing but their performance quickly ruins the good impression.

The lack of lens protection is the first problem to come to mind. This means that the camera will get scratched in no time unless you use the leather case (or any other case) all the time . At least, the E66 has a dedicated camera key which makes using the autofocus snapper much more comfortable than on the E71.

In fact this key and the camera user interface is the best part about the E66 imaging capabilities. The UI is the same as on high-profile Nokia cameraphones, offering more than extensive settings. From manual white balance and ISO sensitivity to exposure compensation, gridline, sharpness and contrast settings, as well as various effects.

Unfortunately, despite the built-in GPS, the Nokia E66 doesn't offer geotagging of its camera photos.

The camera viewfinder and UI

The sequence mode and self-timer are no news. Sequence mode can come in handy for making time-lapse movies. The flash can be set to four positions: automatic, always on, red-eye reduction and always off. Small font tooltips are displayed to indicate what the phone is doing at each specific moment.

The picture quality however is below average. Pictures lack detail and noise levels are very high. The colors are also far from precise and contrast is well behind the best in business. Even in great light conditions we could hardly produce decent pictures. Hard as we try, there is little good we can say about image quality.

After the warning has been issued let's show you what the photos looks like. You can check out the sample photos made with the E66 camera.

Nokia E66 camera samples

Video recording is another disappointment with the E66 camera. Once again, the business mindset lets the E66 get away with the otherwise poor video maxing out at QVGA at 15 fps. As a whole, the camera is the one feature of E66 where you shouldn't expect a lot. It outranks the E71 by only the dedicated shutter key and that's the only improvement. Otherwise, it's the same awful picture quality as the QWERTY-sibling; thumbs down for the E66 camera.