The E63 have been a constant companion for the past 10 months, and this is the report.
Design & Build
The E63 has the standard Nokia E-series look, with the keys occupying half of the front area. The body is plastic and does not attract finger prints or scratches; at least it hasn’t for me. The back seems rubberized, and provides good grip. The battery compartment can be removed by a sliding switch. There is no lock mechanism – this appears fragile, but there has been no problem in the last 10 months. The sides appear bare, with just memory card and micro-USB slots – there aren’t any volume switches or other buttons. On the whole, it has a very practical look.
Keyboard
The keyboard is the essence of any business series phone, and the E63 scores here wonderfully. Once you get used to it, you can reach really high speeds. No touch phone would come even near(I know, I had an LG Cookie earlier). While you cannot probably type out full-page drafts; chats, SMS, Facebook, Tweets, emails – all can be done effortlessly.
Software
The E63 is built on Symbian S60 3rd edition. While this looks like a rather dated piece, it brings its own quality and stability. Unless you install all-and-sundry applications, the E63 can go for months without requiring a reboot.
The Mail-for-Exchange software is supposed to allow seamless integration with Exchange Server, but I don’t have access to test this. There is a reasonable good built-in email client. Quick Office(compatible with MS Office), Adobe PDF reader and a Zip application is built-in, so you can handle all your email attachments easily.
There are some Facebook, Orkut applications, but it proved to be nothing more than bookmarks to the browser. Only Youtube has its own application. The default browser is OK, but its lack of tabs make Opera Mini a better alternative. There is a built-in chat, but I find eBuddy to be much more stable over both the built-in one and fring.
You would also better start an OVI account, so you can sync your contacts, and maybe your calendars. While you still have to manually sync it, I find it reassuring that I can still have all my contacts if you lose data in my phone.
Finally, there is Nokia’s own OVI store. Actually Nokia started its own store even before iPhone, unfortunately, they never had the foresight of guessing out its value and this was pushed to the backyards. Now all of us know apps can make or break a product – and Nokia has been pushing really hard to bring up their store, but it has been a case of too late, too little. I recommend Opera Mini, Putty(if you are technical guy), News Hunt(Indian newspapers), eBuddy(chats), Gmail, Wikipedia and F-Secure Anti-Theft applications.
Calls
This is a true Nokia performer. Calls are stable, and without any problems. The keyboard makes dialing a contact very easy, a fact which sounds unbelievable to someone who has never used such a phone. There is even an option to send a template message when you reject a call.
Multimedia
Business phones are not exactly meant for music, but E63 handles music pretty well. This phone came with a 25-song credit at the OVI India Music store, but too bad you cannot have any more, even if you are willing to pay. The mono speaker is loud enough, but if you have good quality headphones, the E63 does make a good music device.
The device can sync with Windows Media player(in MTP mode) – so you can use that to transfer songs and playlists. Of course, you can drag-drop as a USB drive itself(in Mass Storage mode), but I find WMP much more flexible with music.
Strangely, the E63 has an Internet Radio app – and it even found out a Malayalam channel, which turned out to be pretty good, when internet connection was stable.
For video, there is the Real Player(3gp) and even a Flash Player, which can play .flv files.
The camera is nothing to write about. The flash, however, double up as a very good LED torch, and is much more useful.
Connectivity
This phone is not 3G compatible, at least as we believe 3G to be. Technically it is compatible with a milder version of 3G whose speed caps at 384 kbps. The phone even shows this as 3G, but not the high-speed one.
But EDGE is supported well and I get around 100kbps on my Airtel. You can use this phone as a modem – I have tested it over Windows XP, Windows 7, Ubuntu, Mac, both over cable and Bluetooth; and it does its job decently. While this cannot be your regular internet line, this can be trusted to be used as an emergency backup.
There is no GPS, but you can use Google Maps to get your location – something I have used extensively to know the current station while lying on the upper berths in our trains!
Then there is WiFi. I could not connect it with WPA2 encryption, but WPA came out fine. WiFi heats up the machine(yes, it is more a machine than a phone on WiFi, it is so hot), but when you want to download bigger files or stream videos, Wifi provides much faster way to do it.
Battery
The battery lasts! Even now, it lasts around 3 days, with reasonable amounts of calls and EDGE.
My take - A very practical and value-for-money phone, if you don’t need 3G or camera.