The Nokia E63 is a quad band 3G handset that has all the standard connectivity you need for a smart phone which includes GPRS, EDGE, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. A full QWERTY keyboard can be found on the front of the device that also has a touch sensitive navi-wheel around the D-pad helping you navigate around the menu more smoothly.
The camera is a 2 megapixel type which is not up to the standards, but as the device is mainly a business type device the camera really isn’t what was in the mind. Its has 110 MB on board memory with an SD card up to 8GB in capacity. The Nokia E63 runs the Symbian 9.2 S60 V 3.2 software.The phone measures 113 x 59 x 13 mm which makes it 1mm shorter, 2mm wider and 3mm thinner then it’s E71 brother. It weighs 2 grams less then the E71 which could be to do with it being slimmer, but also the E63 has a plastic case rather then a metal one.
The E63 sits very comfortably in your hand. On the bottom edge of the handset there is a thin Nokia charging socket while on the left edge you will find a USB socket and a microSD card slot, expandable up to 8GB. The top edge includes a 3.5mm audio jack for your ‘phones while the back face features a camera, low-power flash and a mirror to help you line up taking pictures of yourself.
A full qwerty keyboard gets my thumbs up and you access numbers through a function key at bottom left. A wide spacebar is a particularly good feature. Four function keys give access to the home screen, calendar, contacts and email.The home screen seems a little cramped and includes six application shortcuts accessible by the scroll key linking to mail, the web, maps, music player, gallery, clock and mode switch. There’s also a list of several key functions, accessing your Exchange email, setting up your email or internet telephony service and current entries in your calendar.
The mode switch referred to above is a cool concept for those who don’t like mixing business and pleasure. It lets you switch between business mode during the day and a personal mode at night. Your boss will no longer have to listen to your embarrassing personal ringtone any more.push email is hugely important for the E series. The E63 can handle POP, SMTP and IMAP as well as Microsoft Exchange email, through a Mail for Exchange download.
Another interesting download is Files on Ovi, a way to access your PC desktop and files from your handset. To access your PC, you need to sign up for a Nokia account and then download the Files on Ovi connector software to your PC. It works similarly to Microsoft’s Live Mesh system and offers 1 gigabyte of storage on an internet cloud. When you first sign up you get a year’s subscription to the service free of charge. It’s a weird sensation to be on the road and seeing your familiar desktop files pop up on your tiny mobile screen.
The E63 also comes loaded with QuickOffice Premier, which allows you to create simple word processing, spreadsheet and presentations from the device. More realistically, given it s small size, it allows you to open and, crucially, edit email attachments created in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, including the DOCX and XLSX formats of Word and Excel 2007 and to more surpirse it also support for VoIP so you can use internet telephony services when at a wireless hotspot.
