Nokia E6 review

The Nokia E6 is a very capable smartphone aimed directly at the corporate market. However, the mixture of touchscreen and physical QWERTY keyboard positions it very nicely for bloggers and heavy Twitter, Facebook, email or SMS text message users, because typing is a breeze.

We liked

With its 8MP camera and 8GB internal mass storage, the Nokia E6 provides more than enough memory for a small music library, a quantity of captured pictures and video and map data, with the ability to increase it to 40MB with an external memory card.

The widgets on offer aren't too bad anymore, and certainly a step up from the N8 - the thumb friendly interface is a real winner too.

The larger amount of home screens is a positive move from Nokia, as is the resolution on the screen... it may be small but it's pin sharp.

Physical keyboards are becoming scarcer these days, so it's great to see Nokia sticking with the formula and bringing a very usable keyboard indeed.

The internet browser is a great improvement on previous Nokia incarnations, although many will say that it has a distance to go before it truly competes with the responsiveness of Apple and Android smartphones.

We disliked

The main negative is for those who want to use the satellite navigation, because in our opinion, although the screen resolution is second to none, the physical screen size is too small, resulting in the onscreen text being too small to read.

This issue isn't limited to the Maps app, but this is the worst scenario because the phone is further away from you and could prove distracting while driving.

The music player doesn't show any real improvement, which is a disappointment because this is the area in which Nokia falls furthest behind its Apple iPhone 4 competition. When Nokia has invested so much in its music service, it seems surprising that this doesn't show in the E6's mobile client.

The interface still harks back to the golden Symbian days - meaning clunky icon management, with prescribed widget blocks to fit your four chosen icons into, rather than a choice of where they go.

The widgets themselves are proving more useful, but we still want to see more third party options and we wish re-sizing was an option too.

Verdict

The Nokia E6 is a well-built, very capable business phone with plenty of apps and features to suit business users. It's built for text heavy users, with a powerful camera for good light photography.

However, while Symbian Anna is a step forward, it still feels like it's hamstrung by previous iterations with a slightly clunky feel and long time to open some applications still present.

With MeeGo, Nokia has proven it can make a more modern smartphone interface. With the thumb-friendly touchscreen along with the proven E-Series physical QWERTY keyboard, this is a strong competitor to alternatives such as the BlackBerry Bold 9780 and BlackBerry Bold 9900.

The Nokia E6 won't convert Android and Apple users, because this isn't where it's aimed, but it is a smart buy for many text-heavy business users out there.