Nokia E6
It would be better if you keep your E71/72 away from this review. Not that this will give them a fatal system failure or anything, but you wouldn’t want them feeling all useless and depressed. The E71/72 have gotten too old for their own good and Nokia has finally decided to venture forth. The E6 is perhaps one of the best QWERTY smartphones out there (its closest competitor being the Blackberry Bold Touch). The E6 has everything; a VGA screen that overflows with clarity, a sturdy new Symbian Anna, super fast hardware and all this encased in an armor of steel. The E-series loyalists will be more than satisfied with this new addition to Nokia’s arsenal.
Nokia could have very well put in a faster CPU and more RAM, but Symbian Anna is quite at home with the inbuilt hardware. It’s faster than E71/72 by miles. Call quality and signal reception is excellent. The web browser is the fastest till date and loads pages faster than even the high-end Nseries. At 14.8 hours of talktime, it is almost the double that of any Blackberry. The 1500 mAh battery will give you a standby time of 674 hours.
The E6 ships with a lot of awesome features. The media player MP3, WMA, WAV, RA, eAAC and eAAC+ formats and has radio with RDS. The 3.5mm earphones that come with the phone are of superb quality. The camera is an 8MP fixed-focus variant with a dual LED flash. The camera supports face detection, geotagging and smart zoom in video mode. Video can be recorded at 25fps with a max resolution of 720p. It supports WiFi (802.11 b/g/n) and AGPS (with lifetime free voice navigation from Nokia). The phone also has USB-on-the-go which is a huge boon for those who are always in a hurry. The Bluetooth has been upgraded to version 3.0.
The E6 is both a looker and no-nonsense at the same time. The build quality is both high and sturdy. It is available in silver, white and black. The black variant tends to attract fingerprints but the silver version hides them well. The battery cover is metallic with matte plastic on the top and at the bottom. The screen takes up half the phone’s front at 2.46”. It’s a 16M-color capacitive touch screen with almost the same pixel density as the retina display of the iPhone 4S (at 325ppi against 326ppi)
It took the E72 almost two years to stress the fact that it meant business. A few Android versions and iPhone releases later, Nokia can see that business is not what it used to be. Tablets are taking over the market like wildfire, dual cores are aplenty and even BlackBerry has jumped up on the touchscreen wagon. The E6 is aims to replace the E72, and fill up the gaps that the previous Eseries phones have created. The Eseries line is so watertight that it makes any major upgrade somewhat shady. The screen is a huge difference – mostly for the upgrade in resolution, but the touchscreen was not really necessary.
The notable fact is that the latest Symbian Anna helps utilize the D-pad/touchscreen combo to the fullest. The enhanced media capabilities have made the E6 a better entertainment package than its predecessors. The new and faster web browser is another plus point. Along with document editors the E6 is a formidable opponent in the D-pad/touchscreen category.
Keyboard and touchscreen is a combo that has worked and Nokia has already experimented with it in the cute little X3-02 Touch and Type. It’s not foreign in the smartphone category either, from PocketPCs from the days of yore to bar form factor messenger droids.
