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 | Nokia E 63Key features: -Quad-band GSM support -3G support -Landscape 2.36" 16M-color display of QVGA resolution -Symbian 9.2 OS, S60 UI with FP1 (sprinkled with some FP2) -369 MHz ARM 11 CPU and 128 MB of SDRAM -Wi-Fi -2 megapixel fixed focus camera with LED flash -120 MB of internal memory, microSD expansion -MP3 Ringtones -Standard 3.5mm audio jack -Bluetooth v2.0 with A2DP support -microUSB v2.0 -FM radio -Comfortable full QWERTY keypad -Convenient shortcut keys -Provider-independent VoIP support -Office document editor -Nokia Maps -User-friendly Mode Switch for swapping two homescreen setups -Great battery life -Remote Lock and Wipe feature -One-year free subscription for Files on Ovi Nokia E63 is undoubtedly a trimmed-down version of the E71 and almost a return to the E61i roots - with a 2 megapixel camera and no built-in GPS receiver. Well, the camera of the E71 was largely disappointing in the first place plus, an external Bluetooth GPS receiver is always an option, so we hardly count these as serious drawbacks. The styling of the E63 is where the difference is most significant. Nokia E63 still looks OK and feels sturdy, but it sure lacks the solid metal charm of the E71. Anyway, the mild price tag may as well make you forgive the cost-effective approach to the exterior. The potential market rivals of the E63 aren't that many but there are still a few affordable QWERTY smartphones out there. Before we get to the actual competition, let's briefly look at the ageing Nokia E61i. It's got a pretty much identical spec sheet to E63 and boasts some really nice metallic accents. But Nokia E61i keeps the price quite high even 2 years now since its debut and it's got half the RAM and a slower CPU than the E63. Probably the biggest selling point of Nokia E63 is that it's relatively compact for a QWERTY device and Nokia E61i is no match here. Design and construction The success of the QWERTY business tool E71 is a good enough motivation for Nokia to aim at the mass market with the lower-end E63 twin brother (obviously a case of two-egg twins though). The E63 is trying hard to set itself apart from the steel E71 and the red and blue paintjobs do give the newbie some identity, even if the choice of color is questionable. The all-plastic outfit is quite alright - after all, affordability is key here. The earpiece of Nokia E71 is placed dead center at the top of the front panel. A little to the right is the ambient light sensor. Below is the 2.36" display, followed by the main bank of control and navigation keys and the QWERTY keyboard. The screen, keyboard and controls will get their due coverage in a short while. There's nothing on the right hand-side of the handset - nope, no volume rocker this time. The D-pad will do just fine of course during calls and in media players, but it still means a few extra clicks to turn the volume up or down when the music player is playing in the background. Another thing gone is the infrared port - but it doesn't feel like it will be badly missed. On the left you'll find the standard microUSB port and the microSD card slot. Both apertures are sealed with plastic caps to hold off dirt and dust, and keep the contour of the handset intact. The microSD slot is said to support cards of up to 8GB, and this was as far as went testing it. The handset handled a full 8GB microSD card problem-free. At the top are the loudspeaker and the 3.5 mm audio jack. Delighted as we are to see no sign of the unsightly red power knob of Nokia E71, the 3.5 mm AV connector is the real treat here - one thing the newbie has over its high-end sibling. The audio jack is sealed but we actually doubt it the protective cap will last long enough: it's not attached to the body and can be easily misplaced. The bottom of Nokia's latest messenger features the mouthpiece and the charger plug on the left and the lanyard eyelet on the right. The front frame that encloses the keypad and the screen is made of glossy plastic. It gets no visible smudges - another benefit over E71 - but it does get greasy and slippery after a while of use. It's quite easy to clean though. The Nokia E63 rear - though hardly as classy as the E71 - is truly fingerprint-proof. It's made of matt plastic and the soft rubbery finish makes the handset a pleasure to handle. Rearside Nokia E63 features the 2 megapixel camera lens, with LED flash and a self-portrait mirror. The whole combo (except for the LED flash) is covered by a transparent layer, which in turn has no protection whatsoever from scratches, except that it is a tiny bit recessed. To remove the battery cover you only need to gently slide the latch at the bottom of the rear and lift the cover. Fitting it back is easy as pie - just repeat the same steps backwards. What's under the cover is truly worth cheers: the 1500 mAh BP-4L Li-Ion battery is the same unit we saw - and loved - in Nokia E71). With a power plant like this one, seems like there's no stopping Nokia E63. It is quoted at 432 hours of stand-by time and 11 and a half hours of talk time and that's more than impressive. Considering the excellent battery life of the E71, we are more than sure the E63 won't let you down. And this time around the power-hungry GPS is not even in the picture. The build quality of Nokia E63 is commendable even if this is not the kind of handset to turn heads like the flashy E71. Nokia E63 handles nicely and ergonomics haven't been sacrificed. It even dares to challenge the haughty original with a 3.5 mm audio jack placed at the top and fingerprint resistance. It only feels the E63 could've been notably lighter than the steel-clad E71. That would've been another definite asset. Display is the same Nokia E63 has a 2.36" 16M-color QVGA screen. That`s the same display found in the Nokia E71 and back then sacrificing screen estate to make the phone more compact and pocket-friendly seemed right. But again, maybe not all Nokia E61 upgraders will agree. Size aside, the screen performance is great, with excellent contrast and vivid image. Sunlight legibility is commendable as usual with Nokia TFT screens. Keyboard is more comfortable The Nokia E63 QWERTY keyboard is an almost complete replica of what we had with the E71. There are a few minor changes but the overall usability is unaffected. The most important novelty has nothing to do with typing. Pressing and holding the space bar in standby powers up the LED so you can use your handset a flashlight. That's a nice little perk and it even works with the keyboard locked. The other obvious change is the size of the actual space bar: its size has been reduced compared to E71 and now the bottom row accommodates two extra keys. Our team is divided over whether a parenthesis symbol and a standalone Ctrl key are a bargain over a big nice space bar. Anyway, the rest is no news if you've read our E71 review and in the case of these here couple of Nokia messengers no news is good news. You shouldn't expect regular desktop typing speed and you'll certainly have to look at the keypad but you can achieve pretty decent results with the E63. If you are into texting, you are sure to get used to it quickly and start speeding your way through messages in no time. The controls above the keypad are also quite handy, obviously copying the E71 and the E51 layout. Those include the two soft keys, the Call and End keys (the red one now doubles as a power key and shortcut to ringing profiles), the Menu key and three so-called one-touch keys. One-touch keys can be set as shortcuts to any application you like, never mind the icons on them might suggest otherwise. Furthermore, you can assign two applications per key, making use of the press and press-and-hold function on all of them. The D-pad is equally pleasing. Its ample size and tactility do add to the excellent mark on ergonomics for E63. Still, you should be warned that the Nokia E63 lacks touch sensitive Navi wheel functionality as it was suggested earlier on when the device was fort announced. Still, a try-before-buy is advisable for people with larger fingers, as the QWERTY keypad knobs might not feel as comfortable to them. Same user interface as E71 Nokia E63 runs on Symbian 9.2 with Series60 3rd Edition UI. It comes with Feature Pack 1 but it also brings in a number of enhancements inherent to Feature Pack 2. Nokia E63 is powered by a single 369 MHz CPU and has 128MB of RAM . In Symbian terms this means that navigating the menus is fast with instant response to key presses and no delays whatsoever. Memory Full warnings are highly unlikely and you should make quite an effort to deplete the available memory. The phone's main menu has two view modes: a 4 x 3 grid of icons and a list. However with the E63 you cannot even opt for having animated icons as with most other Nokia phones. This is probably just another way of reiterating the business targeting of the phone. At least the font size is configurable depending on your preferences. The circle next to the icon of a running application is a well known Symbian indication reminding users to quit unwanted applications that are still running in the background. The active standby mode goes without saying on Nokia E63. This is a nice and convenient way to bring shortcuts to all favorite applications to your home screen. You can even assign shortcuts to websites of your choice for quicker access. Furthermore, each of the one-touch keys can be customized to access any feature (actually two per key) of choice. The two soft keys' functions can also vary. If active standby is off you can also assign shortcuts to the directions of the D-pad. Luckily, although the keypad lock pattern is the usual quick successive pressing of the left selection key and the Fn key, the left key no longer lags before acting, like it used to on previous models. There is also an automatic key lock on the E63. It gets activated upon a user-defined interval with the options ranging from 5 seconds to an hour. This option can also be disabled if the user sees fit. As of E 71, a nifty feature allows you to toggle between two different phone setups - the so-called Mode Switch. Each of them can be customized with its own theme and homescreen applications for maximizing usability. This way you can have a leisure and business profile and alternate them at the expense of a single click. The built-in memory is 120MB, which is a decent count by all means. Unfortunately, there is no memory card included in the retail package. As we managed to confirm, Nokia E63 has no problem handling an 8GB microSD card. Accessing applications or any other files on the memory card is quick and you probably won't notice any difference compared to accessing ones in the phone memory. As with any Symbian phone, there is a built-in voice recognition system. It is launched by holding the right soft key and is doing a good job, being fully speaker-independent and recognizing a very high percentage of the user commands. And finally, there's the same feature as on the E71 - the Remote Wipe. It's not a new feature per se, but up until now it was usually reserved for corporate scenarios. Now it's available to everyone. In case your Nokia E63 gets stolen or lost, you simply need to send a coded SMS to your SIM card number. The phone then gets locked down and upon three unsuccessful attempts of unlocking it, it's wiped clean of all personal or sensitive info. You might not get your Nokia E63 back, but at least nobody will access your personal data either. Customization There are five preinstalled themes on Nokia E63. The rest is left to the imagination of the user, as you can download as many other themes as you wish. Before doing that though, make sure you they are meant for landscape QVGA or you might run into compatibility issues. Uncompromising music player Full featured music abilities are not supposed to be make-or-break in a device like Nokia E63. However this doesn't make the onboard music player any less of a good application. After all, the Symbian S60 music player is a seasoned performer and it didn't cost Nokia anything to just put it in the E63 too. The lack of dedicated music keys is easily overcome by the smooth D-pad control. There is a huge number of audio formats supported including MP3, AAC, eAAC+ and WMA. M3U playlists are also managed seamlessly and transferred files are added to the music library trouble-free by choosing the refresh option. Filtering tracks by artist, album, genre and composer is automatic and searching tracks by gradual typing is also at hand. Tracks are uploaded to Nokia E63 via Bluetooth, USB or by simple download. You can also use a card reader for that purpose and transfer them directly to your memory card. Upon completing a USB transfer, the phone automatically prompts scanning for new music tracks and, if allowed to do so, adds the new ones to the music library. The player comes with five equalizer presets and stereo widening effect. You can also create new equalizer presets if the preloaded ones won't do. Finally, Nokia E63 includes support for the A2DP Bluetooth profile of course, which allows listening to music on a Bluetooth stereo headset. Audio quality We had a bad feeling about this one and our test materialized our worries. The Nokia E63 achieved one of the worst results in our audio quality test we have ever seen. Apart from the decent (notice we are not saying good) total harmonic distortion and intermodulation distortion levels there is little good news about its performance. The frequency response is way off target. In fact we haven't ever seen a retail version of a handset to score worse than the E63 on this one -almost as if an equalizer is turned on constantly. The Noise level, dynamic range, and stereo crosstalk reading also fall seriously short of being impressive. Video player Nokia E63 features the Real player for playing your video clips. The video player only works in landscape mode, which is quite reasonable given the screen orientation. Portrait videos are rare enough anyway. Luckily, there is also a fullscreen mode, which is quite enjoyable on the generously-sized screen. Furthermore, the soft-key functions are hidden in full screen, so that they don't stand in the way and only pop up when a key is pressed. Image gallery The gallery of Nokia E63 doesn't have the rotating 3D view we are used to seeing in the Nseries but it is completely on par in terms of functionality. No changes are to be seen here in terms of features - you can easily browse images and zoom in up to 8x. Overall, picture browsing and zooming is fast and even comparably large files are sure not to bother you too much. We have seen a couple of Nokia handsets do even better but the E63 is doing more than fine, and it's not really meant to be a multimedia gadget. 2 megapixel snapper: shouldn't have bothered The Nokia E63 - is equipped with a 2 megapixel camera with fixed focus, LED flash and self-portrait mirror. You can't really expect much from a 2 megapixel snapper especially given the Nokia E71 3-megapixel unit was quite disappointing. Much like the Nokia E71, the E63 camera lens lacks any lens protection. This means that the glass above the camera lens will get scratched in no time unless you use a carrying case at all times. The lack of a dedicated camera key is also a downer. The camera user interface is very simple and strange in the same time mainly because the viewfinder window does not fit fullscreen. The camera interface is the basic Nokia one (as seen on Nokia 6210 Navigator or Nokia 5320 XpressMusic) and even has fewer options than the one on the Navigator. For example - there's no Panorama mode and the options toolbar hosts fewer shortcuts. The scarce additional options allow for setting the white balance or adding four different color tones to your images. Also there are a self timer, night and sequence mode, but we hardly believe you will use them more than once. The Nokia E63 image quality is below average. Pictures lack detail and noise levels are high. The colors are also far from being precise and as a whole there is hardly anything good we can say. It seems ditching the camera altogether could've been an option to consider, granted especially that the E71 still lacks a camless version along the lines of E50 and E51. Anyway, you can check out the sample photos made with the E63 camera. Video recording is another let down with the E63 camera. The business-minded handset only manages QVGA videos at 15 fps, which has MMS written all over. As a whole, the camera is the one feature of E63 yelling business-comes-first. It's understandable though, given the price tag. E-series: connecting people like no other With the shameful camera performance behind us, it's time to check out the connectivity options. This is a great chance for the messenger to repair its damaged reputation. Nokia E63 almost has it all: from Bluetooth v2.0 and USB v2.0 to quad-band GSM, Wi-Fi and dual-band UMTS. HSDPA support however is lacking and there's no Infrared port as on Nokia E71 (not a big loss anyway). A hot-swappable microSD card slot is also on board. It might just be the quickest way of transferring data and quite convenient too. According to the manufacturer, it should support capacities up to 8GB, and it does. Unfortunately, we didn't have a 16GB card handy to test it beyond that. Nokia E63 is also 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. Nokia E63 has no built-in GPS receiver. If you need one, your only option is to connect external one via Bluetooth. Web browser Browsing the internet on a Symbian smartphone is always a pleasure. With the E63 and its landscape screen it's all the better. Reading is much more convenient and, thanks to the great page rendering, content fits perfectly on screen and looks exactly like on a PC. The virtual mouse cursor takes browsing another level up. It is easy to control and generally works great. A mini-map can be activated to help navigating your way around large sites where lots of scrolling is required. The zoom level is also easily adjustable at the expense of only a few key presses. The web browser also offers fullscreen view mode. The large amount of RAM is another thing that improves the browser performance. The web browser is one of the most RAM-hungry applications. With the E63 you are extremely unlikely to run out of RAM even if you load very heavy web pages and have a few applications running in the background. The ample 2.36" display is another welcome boost to browsing. The final touches to the Nokia E63 browser are the built-in full Java and Flash support. Having surfed quite frequently for the past week, we didn't manage to stumble upon any flash content the E63 was unable to handle. Flash video is also not a problem for the E63 web browser - you can watch video on the full-featured versions of YouTube and the likes. 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. |
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