On November 21St 2011, the East
African franchise of Nokia officially launched the latest in a series of its
smartphones, the Nokia E6, onto the Ugandan Market. I was privileged to attend
the colorful event at the Serena Hotel, having gotten my corporate invite a
couple of days earlier. Only a few journalists had been invited, plus us (well,
I doubled as both, really) the corporate fraternity. In all, we were about sixty
(60) in a medium sized hall that hosted us for the do. Okay, enough of the adulation
and more of what actually took me there, the specifics…
A friend I had been invited with already had
an E5, and eagerly wished to see what this new monster had in store. To be
honest, on face value, there aren’t many new features noticeable in a
comparison between the E5 and its new cousin. But a deeper analysis of the Nokia
E6 reveals a notable improvement over the E5. The E6 offers a touch-screen
interface, improved Symbian OS and a more robust and aesthetically-pleasing
design. Delving further revealed a few more tweaks and enhancements. Read on…
· Design: Nokia E6 is quite the looker, but in a decent, serious way,
especially if one takes into consideration the phone's target: business. It strongly
resembles its E-series predecessors thanks to its metallic body and full
portrait QWERTY keyboard, but E6 also offers users the possibility to combine
the touch features of the screen with the advantages of a physical keyboard. The
E6 stands at 115.5 x 59 x 10.5 mm and weighs 133g (battery included). It feels
perfectly balanced while kept in hand.
· The Camera: The
E6's 8MP fixed focus rear-facing camera with dual LED flash is excellent; not
just in terms of picture quality, but also in usability. Now, tell me one gadget-freak
that wouldn’t wish to own such a gadget?!
· Menu and Software: The most visible change offered by Symbian Anna
(The new OS the E6 runs) is the newly designed icons that appear quite stylishly
rounded. The E6’s browser is now much faster than the usual Nokia browser,
while the text input has been improved with a split screen when entering text
into web pages. Application-wise, the E6 doesn't come up with anything new, but
additional third-party software can be installed via Ovi Store.
· Communication: Nokia E6 is a quad-band GSM (850 / 900 / 1800
/ 1900) smartphone and 5-band HSDPA 850/900/1700/1900/2100 (10.2 Mbps) and
HSUPA (2 Mbps) compatible. GPRS and EDGE class 33 are also included as an
alternative. The handset covers almost all connectivity options available in
the market, including Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, UPnP technology, Bluetooth 3.0 with
A2DP, microUSB v2.0 and USB On-the-go support.
· Memory: The E6 comes with built in Memory of 8GB, which is no bad start
by any means.
· Multimedia: In as much as the E6 is by definition a
business phone, it still performs excellent when it comes to multimedia
features. The music player included is the same found on all Symbian^3 devices.
It features cover-flow capability and allows users to create playlist or sort their
music libraries by artist, genre or album. If you're not content with what you
hear inside your earphones you can use the equalizer to make the music sound
better-including the option to create your own preset equalizer. The sound
quality is very high, even better when one attaches the phone to an external
amplifier.
· Battery: Nokia E6 is powered by a standard BP-4L battery, which is rated
by the manufacturer for up to 14 hours and 50 minutes (7 hours and 30 minutes
for 3G) of talk time or up to 681 hours (744 hours for 3G) of standby time.
Yeah, that’s about one (1) month of standby battery time!
· Price: In case you harbored any plans of acquiring an E6, you had better
brace yourself for a huge expense. A brand new Nokia E6 will set you back by around
£260(about 1.2m UGX).
Other notable features: Aside from its stylish design lines and solid feel, Nokia E6 seems
to have consolidated all the good features of its E-series predecessors. The E6
has got the Nokia mail for exchange, a feature that can be well utilized by
both the business class and today’s young corporates to access their office
mail. It also has admin functions such as AE256 encryption, device data
protection, device security; data wipe.
The device lock feature incorporated within
the E6 also helps the system administrators to manage mail exchange servers
without really compromising the server’s security (Personally, I have not used
this feature, so I won’t go into details of how it works!). Other messaging
services also include e-mail synchronization for one’s various e-mail accounts..
The Bad Points:
· The OS: Overall, one still gets the feeling that putting a better CPU into
Symbian phone is not the answer for revitalizing Nokia's old platform. It
appears that the operating system's limitations does not allow for better
performance no matter the hardware configuration of the device. The biggest
issue for E6 is that it runs Symbian, which is still much slower than other
mobile platforms recently launched on the market.
· The Narrow Screen: Despite feeling sturdy and well-built, the
narrow screen could, quite easily, have been made larger, but oh no, Nokia
decided to stick a bit of black plastic below the keyboard on the E6. Actually,
one of its immediate predecessors, the Nokia E5 has a slightly bigger screen. At
2.46inches it is stupidly thin and hasn't been optimized for touchscreen use; despite
the fact that the 2.46inches on offer are actually 2.46inches of good quality
screen!
Additional info from: http://news.softpedia.com
-Dan B. Atuhaire
You are welcome, Khan. Thanks for the appreciation.
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