Mobile Review reviews the Nokia E65

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Some snippets:

Have you ever tried to image a red-coated enterprise device? I find this pretty challenging, but the fact is – for the very first time Eseries sways towards the fashion segment.

All in all the build quality is not something we can complain about – the halves don’t feel spongy, the device slides open and closed with ease, thanks to the spring-loaded slide mechanism. However, in three days it lost the smoothness of sliding action, it got a tad slower, with the addition of a clang, but we managed to find the explanations outright – the keypad is framed by a metallic inset, whose surface is patterned as well, in order to emphasize the texture of the material used. And the halves will always stick to this surface, and it gets scratched in no time. Well-visible abrasions emerge in four days of usage. Though it is not an issue from the mechanical point of view – the slider will remain good at zipping open and closed for a long while – this doesn’t add points to the E65’s looks.

The device is newsworthy for the platform it employs, being built on S60 3rd edition with no Feature Packs installed (and you can’t patch the system with them manually either). This lays some serious restrictions on the phone as well as on the initial concept of an enterprise solution. What do you think, for example, about 1 minute length of a sound clip? Or about settings scattered all over the menus? And so on. I’m not casting a shadow on this solution’s functionality, but already available updates look much more interesting and more functional. Even the OSS Browser is 1.0 (the second version has already been released as a part of Future Pack 1).

Just like many S60-powered devices, the 6290 houses a 2 Mpix CMOS-camera manufactured by Toshiba (OTCPK: TOSBF). But unless you are in great lighting conditions, the shots will keep going out noisy and blurry.

In fact the E65’s design is the thing that will sell the device, everywhere but in the enterprise market. There is much confusion in positioning of various Nokia (NYSE: NOK)-branded devices, even the company itself occasionally has a hard time explaining what the advantage of the product is, why it is dubbed as enterprise rather than a fashion phone. Nokia E65 will retail for 400 Euro or 450 Euro and more, which is unreasonably much. At that the hefty price tag is accompanied by a poor sales package – no memory card, mono headset, meaning that for music you’ll have to get a new pair of headphones, and Pop Port jack. On the other hand the market hasn’t seen any direct rivals to this model yet, even in terms of dimensions, similar solutions running on the S60 are arriving in the market a bit later. Overall, the E65 turns out to be a successful model; however it won’t be a best-seller. All this mess in positioning leads to dramatic reductions of the handsets’ life times, and this goes for the E65 as well, which means that the phone’s main audience, specifically those trendy persons, won’t be able to buy this handset with a year of usage in mind – this just won’t work out with Nokia E65.

So, at the end of the day, we have a well-packed device, sporting typical functionality for current S60 solutions, an add-on in the form of WiFi, a few extra keys and Team Suite that are of little use actually. The handset’s best looking departments are size and design, thus the E65 might be your choice if you are looking for these aspects.