The Nokia E6 is with me for nearly 2 weeks now and I am ready to say a few words about this pocket friendly QWERTY device. I was a BlackBerry user and I often end up with frustration and a  lot of complains whenever I try out a non-BlackBerry QWERTY phone. The Nokia E72 and Motorola Charm are example of QWERTY devices which did badly in my tests and reviews.

Some of you might be surprised when I said Nokia E72 because the E72 and E6 are a lot similar. Both are Symbian phones and both are from Nokia. So, does that mean that the E6 is another failure?

To be frank, the Nokia E6 impressed me a lot. It is one of the QWERTY phone that I like but still, it couldn’t impress me as much as the Nokia E71.Yes, the Nokia E71 was the 1st QWERTY phone that gave me the WOW factor; and I couldn’t find in any other QWERTY phone except BlackBerry. By the way, not all BlackBerry phones impress me . Ok, back to Nokia E6 now

As for the Nokia E6, there are still some minor bugs with the Symbian OS but the new Anna version is definitely a lot better compared to the previous versions.

 

Good and bad about this phone

Good :

1) The combination of touch screen and QWERTY.

2) Option to have 5 minutes push email interval instead of 15 minutes in previous versions.

3) Os is less buggy. OS freezes but not as frequent or as bad as previous versions.

4) soft and comfortable to press QWERTY keyboard.

5) Overall design of the phone – classy and good quality.

 

Bad :

1) less buggy OS but still buggy – a Symbian “trademark”.

2) very sensitive light sensor.

3) ring tones almost can’t be heard when placed in the pouch that comes with the phone.

4) Inconsistent battery life. It is sometimes excellent and sometimes worse than the worst.

 

Anyway, the above are all based on what I felt during my 2 weeks of usage. Some of them may not be true because of the settings etc. As for the light sensor, I am not able to find any setting to turn it off and I assume that there is no setting for it.

When I said about the inconsistent battery life, some of you may have got panic but not to worry because it is related to apps running in the background. I had the battery lasting for 1.5 days with 15 minutes call, 2-3 smses, continuous push emails (2 Gmail and 1 Microsoft Exchange), 2-3 photos & 15 minutes web surfing. Today morning, I charged it full and it only lasted for 9 hours. The worst part is, I didn’t use my phone at all. Even the push email was turned off. Anyway, the reason for the battery to finish that fast was, I’ve disabled the WLAN power saving mode. So a minor change to your setting will cause a big difference to your battery life.

I will explain in detail about the phone’s pros and cons in my full review. At the moment, I do not want to say something wrong and scare everyone. However, I am sure that you will be impressed with the phone if you mainly use your it for messaging & email.

What makes this phone better than the Nokia E72? Firstly, the Nokia E72 does not have a widget. So, what is the problem there? One thing that I liked in my Nokia E71 is, the email app is integrated (kind of) with the phone itself, which means that I will receive notifications. It is not only ring tones but the notification light will blink and email icon will be shown at the screen as well. Unfortunately for E72, I will not know whether there is any new email came in for me IF I miss the ring tone notification.

For Nokia E6, I have the same problem too but the widgets help me to solve my problem. By just looking at the screen, I can know if there is any new email for me, thanks to the email widget. Not only that, the E72 has a lot of disadvantage when it comes to web surfing etc. Seriously, the touch screen of E6 helps a lot in this matter.

If I am to make a detailed comparison of these 2 phones, I can come up with a lot of disadvantages in Nokia E72. Well, I will not go into detail because the E72 is a 2 years old phone model and it is not worth talking about it now.

Well, that is all for my 1st impression about the Nokia E6. I will be comparing the Nokia E6 and BlackBerry in my next article. You should not miss that one