The bottom line: The Nokia E6 is a midrange phone for business users who are not fixated on social networking.
The Nokia E6 looks very much like its business-oriented predecessors, the popular E71 and E72, but adds an LCD touchscreen. It's the first handset to ship with Symbian Anna, and may be the litmus test for the success of the new OS. Generally, the phone has a nice heft to it, and feels solid. It's made of stainless steel and glass, with chrome bumpers reminiscent of the BlackBerry Bold range of phones. However it does not have much grip and had the tendency to slip out of hands. Not that it is particularly worrying though, as the phone seems like it can endure a few falls.The 640 x 480 (VGA) capacitive LCD touch screen is vibrant, showing off Symbian Anna's new icons quite nicely. However, screen real estate had to make way for the QWERTY keyboard, so the display is only 2.46 inches, which is tiny if you're getting used to the 4-inch monsters in the market today.
Also, do note that the touchscreen isn't oleophobic, so it's a fingerprint magnet.
Besides the QWERTY keyboard, you'll find a directional pad and physical buttons for home, messaging, contacts and calendar functions. The D-pad makes navigating the E6's screen a lot easier, especially when composing emails and messages.
Some may find the buttons too small and closely spaced to feel comfortable, but the Nokia E6's QWERTY keyboard is just the right size for one-handed typing. It also has a good level of tactile feedback--so that you can compose long emails without your fingers cramping.
The microSD slot is conveniently located on the top of the phone, so you won't have to remove the battery to change cards.
The Nokia E6 is the first Symbian Anna handset to be released and so far we like the new kid on the block. It's relatively easy on the eyes with the colorful icons and four customizable home screens.Overall, communication (messaging and email) is a breeze, with our one minor quibble with predictive text inputs. If you're a Grammar Nazi, it might matter that it does not automatically change lower case i's to capital letters.
The major disadvantage of getting a Symbian phone is the dearth of apps in the Ovi Store. At the time of this review, the number of apps in the Ovi Store is a tenth of what's available on Apple's App Store.
Furthermore, there are no dedicated Twitter or Facebook apps in the Ovi Store, so you will have to access these social networking sites via the Ovi Social widget on the home screen. Strangely, you won’t be able to set the refresh intervals, and the only way to update your feed is to access the app. In addition, it does not have a notifications feature.
The new Symbian browser loaded Web sites quickly, except that it did not have the tendency to reflow text. And, the small screen made reading Web pages a chore. Neither did it do justice to the updated version of Ovi Maps. This is a pity, because Ovi Maps gives you offline turn-by-turn navigation in 80 countries, so that you can use it overseas.
Being a business-oriented smartphone, the E6 supports Mail for Exchange, with added features like enforced encryption and certificate-based authentication, alongside the usual POP3/IMAP accounts. It also offers Cisco SSL VPN support.
The phone comes with a number of preinstalled applications like Quickoffice, F-secure Mobile Security, Microsoft Communicator Mobile, Adobe Reader and JoikuSpot Premium, which allows you to share your 3G connection as a Wi-Fi hotspot.
In terms of connectivity, you get the full range of options here: Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS and HSDPA.
The phone has an excellent 8-megapixel camera with dual LED-flash and HD 720p video recording. It handles low-light situations without flash very well. In addition, there's a built-in photo editor for touching up your images--for example, cropping, adding clip art, picture effects and removing red-eye. Unfortunately, you can forget about taking any closeups with this camera, as it has a fixed-focus lens.
The Nokia E6's ARM11 680MHz processor isn't the snappiest in the market, but using the phone was relatively zippy. Anna experienced the occasional lag, needing one or two more taps to launch applications.In any case, the phone's 1,500mAh battery will last a full day with average usage, pushing a Gmail account and Ovi Social refreshed once every two hours.
Voice calls and reception were generally fine and we didn't experience any dropped calls during our time using the handset.
The Nokia E6 makes a good business smartphone, as long as you can overlook its weaknesses in social networking. At S$570 (US475) without operator subsidies, it is also a reasonably priced phone for its class.