Nokia E63 Cell Phone

Alright, controversial title here so I will now try to back it up. You see, just days before I got this thing I had an iPhone 2G, 8GB unlocked & jailbroken and I didn't think much of it. For one, I could not live with the touch-screen virtual keyboard - its awful. The E63 wins hands down here. The build quality and touchey Web 2.0 style interface didn't really do much for me either. The iPhone is a toy, a preppy kid's plaything for watching video and 'socialising' on Facebook. The E63 is a practical communications tool, packed with features and built to last.

If you buy this phone, do yourself a favour and buy a factory unlocked unbranded one. Carrier subsidies just mean you are paying for your phone over a long period and you are left with a crippled device. It's only $200 which is very cheap for such a device.

The casing
The E63 is all plastic which could be something you don't like but this also means the phone is very light, all the components are easy and cheap to replace. I did not open the E63 yet but I probably should - my warranty could be void anyway since I de-branded it and removed the carrier branding from Hutchison 3G. This also means I get to choose between 3G, GSM or both - a feature the branded firmware had disabled.

The backplate covers all of the phone except the camera which sticks out, even so the camera is well protected with a bit of metal and plastic cover which may or may not be easy to replace. The case appears to be made of essentially 3 parts - front cover, middle which holds the motherboard and battery and the backplate. It would be trivial to disassemble and put back together, like most Nokias. These things are made to be serviced and refurbished, made to last which is more than I can say about the iPhone.

If you look closely you can see the edge of the front cover is slightly higher than the display which goes a long way to protecting the display when it's turned upside down or anything. It is a very nice phone to hold, nice smooth lozenge shape. Connectors except the one for the charger are well protected by bits of rubber so those shouldn't get clogged with crap or get damaged easily. The 3.5mm jack also has a rubber cover but nothing to attach this to the phone but it's well worth holding onto this bit of rubber because with daily use crap will get into the headphone socket and possibly cause it to stop working.

Best of all, you can get this phone with a red casing. Which is freaking awsoem! The picture for this review shows a black one but I don't like that so much, I have seen it in real life and it looks bland. Red is in my humble opinion the best colour for a phone. This is also a nice shiny colour red, doesn't look tacky in any way.

Keyboard
This must be the main reason I got the phone, before this I had a Nokia E51 and the predictive text/T9 keypad was starting to annoy me bigtime. A phone with a keyboard is good, the keys are kind of cramped but its certainly not the worst full keyboard I used on a phone.

This keyboard is better than that on the Nokia E61 and the iPhone. It isn't better than the keyboard on the E75 and the Nokia 6810 (2004 phone but has the best keyboard ever put on a mobile phone). Keys are cramped but I have little fingers so I can use it easily. The keyboard is backlit but not very bright. Also sometimes the backlight for the keyboard doesn't come on - I don't know why this is, probably a software thing as a reboot will fix it.

There is a good selection of keys except no 'tab', the tab is useful to me because i use an app called PuTTy for ssh'ing into my server at home and if you've ever used a UNIX terminal you will know how useful the tab key is.

Dialing numbers on it is as easy as any other phone, unlike one particular phone I won't mention again you can just type in the number (or the name with the keyboard) on the standby screen and press the green button. A new feature in the OS is that names matching the letters you typed in will appear straight away so you can call them or send messages to. The keys don't wobble or anything either, not like on the E61, tis all really stiff and packed together but due to the rounded shape of the keys I rarely push the wrong one.

The centre key is also easy to use, raised a fair bit off the rest of the keys and hard to push other keys accidentally. Tis easy to get around the menus with this, not a bother. There are no animated slidey effects to slow you down, tis very responsive and there is a definite click to let you know you pushed the key down.

Battery life, reception
The battery is freaking huge, like when you take off the cover all you see is the battery, and some more battery. If you look closely you can see the SIM holder and a camera but that's it. Honestly, I don't know how long it lasts because I've been playing with it so much. But I'll tell ya one thing, it lasts longer than the E51's battery.

Reception, again I have no clue. It's fine, not a problem. The antenna is in the bottom of the phone so your jaw gets fried instead of your brain but some people don't like phones with the antenna in the bottom because of the reception issues. I live in Ireland most days, reception isn't a problem. I am exactly 3 miles away from from a BTS and a Node B (for 3G) so I don't have any trouble. Besides, if I go somewhere there is no coverage I just whip out the Thuraya sat-phone.

Wifi seems slightly better than that of the E51 but maybe it's just my imagination. I don't like that they have removed infrared because I have this little line-by-line scanner and it's very hard to connect to my linux box, using the E51 + infrared it was easy to transfer things over.

The operating system, user interface
Alright this is what puts most people off Nokia phones for some reason. They have seen animated 2.0 iPhone interface and are totally besotted by the hype surrounding it. Truthfully, the iPhone's interface is not that great. People are easily ammused by animated effects and the illusion of user-friendliness but if the iPhone, Google Android and the likes are easy to use it is only because they have removed so many features.

The E63's Symbian OS is not hard to use. If anything, this one is easier than most other S60 phones I have used. The icons are very clear, they have done a bit of work to make this more user friendly. I admit that putting S60 on a regular phone like the E51 is possibly not such a good idea but on the E63, its great.

The icons are slightly remensicent of oldskool UNIX GUI's but I like that. Much better than these shiny round-edge buttons you see. Nice grey, square simple ones. The way it should be - of course if you don't like, you can get a different theme for free.

Some menu items can be a bit hard to find, like where to switch off that awful automatic keyboard lock (its under 'security', where you change your PIN) or where to change the 'active standby' applications but really you don't spend too much time using these features so they can be a bit hidden.

Another new feature is the switch between 'home' and 'business' modes. A pointless feature I think for a single-SIM phone. Yeah, Nokia need to make a dual-SIM phone and then we'll talk about that feature. Besides, I don't need it, I don't have a job due to recession. I spend my time writing reviews on the internet for pittance.

When you get the phone there are a few different ways of getting into messaging, the menu - the common features basically but you can customise exactly what each button does.

There are several themes included, I'm happy with the default ruby red one - red background, white text. But there are several others including a lighter shade which makes the screen the same colours as the inside of a vagina. If you like the outside of your phone to be red and the inside to be vagina coloured, go for it!

Email
When I installed new firmware it tried to also install this new "Nokia Messaging" or "Nokia Email" service that Nokia are pushing these days, it sucks. The user interface sucks, its animated, its HTTP based, its 2.0, it sends your emails through a bunch of servers run by Nokia (although there is a way to get it to connect direclty to your own email server). Don't install this, use the normal client, its simple, does the job and connects to the email server directly.

You see, Nokia are trying to team up with mobile phone networks and want to charge separately for this service. Don't go for it, stick to the ordinary POP3/IMAP. Soon you will have to buy and install Profimail if you don't like Nokia's proxied (and separately charged-for) service. Not good, this is one of the main reasons I chose the E63 over the E75. The others are price and the fact that I don't like slider-type phones, a less reliable design than the regular shape phones.

The email client is pretty basic, but does everything you are likely to want it to, handles attachments of pretty much any type without trouble. It *does* read html email, you just have to open the attachment and HTML email will appear in the browser.

Camera
The camera is crap, lets face it. Only barely good enough for some functional snapshots. Nothing serious, you wouldnt use this to take pictures of the stuff you're selling on eBay. Video isn't great either, but alright. It will do when there is nothing else around.

You also need to install an app called cCam or the likes or hack the phone which is currently impossible, seemingly. To disable that dreaded shutter sound. If I wanted to hear a shutter sound I would have picked up my SLR which has an actual shutter. I don't want some politically correct anti-pervert feature on my phone, I am not a pervert and will not be treated as such (despite the vagina comment). Also, if I was a pervert my own phone should not be taking sides other than my own. The shutter sound is damn annoying, too.

Quality is comparable to E51, iPhone 2G camera.

Flashlight
This is supposed to be the flash for the camera, but forget that. Its worthless as a flash but damn good as a flashlight. Almost a serious competitor to my 2AA Maglite LED torch. The light doesn't throw as far as the maglite but at a much wider angle. It's not as good as the maglite of course but you could definitely go for a walk at night in the pitch dark with only this.

Web browser
Not great for browsing websites but alright for RSS feeds and mobile websites. If you want to browse websites buy a laptop, seriously. Even the iPhone isn't good for browsing websites and with the rate that web developers are putting more bloat into their websites every day you'll need to buy a new phone every six months if you want to continue browsing on your phone without having the thing run out of RAM with every site.

Internet phone (SIP)
Alright, I pity the fool who buys this phone and doesn't use the internet phone. You can make calls for half nothing over the internet, or free if you call other IP phones. I have mine set up with Blueface, a little known Irish SIP provider. Whenever there is free WiFi I can use this to call people instead of the expensive mobile phone network. Have it set up as a shortcut so its easily accessible.

You have to enter a few settings to get it to work but well worth it, look around for SIP providers in your country or just sign up with Blueface, Voipstunt or Voiptalk. Accounts are free, you only pay for calls to landlines other non-IP phones and sometimes those are free too!

The built-in Internet Phone application is far better than Fring and the likes, it integrates far better with the phone and you connect directly to the SIP provider, use only their proxy. You see Fring and the likes will relay everything through their own proxies, further reducing quality and creating latency. Do yourself a favour and spend the 5-10 minutes it takes to set this up.

The E63 does a lot more than the average dedicated wireless IP phone and it's cheaper too. It can even be set to make calls over Wifi by default.


Applications
In recent years Symbian has become more restrictive and the E63's firmware right now is hard to jailbreak. Before this wasn't even necessary but now you need it to get low-level access to the phone's directory structure.

One app I miss from my hacked E51 is the field test, which meant I could see which cells were in the area, I could even choose which ones my phonecalls and data go through. I just hope they update Helloox soon so I can install this again. I am a total telecoms nerd, love all this stuff with seeing how the network goes about its business, modulation, timeslots and all this malarky.

There are tons of apps available for S60v3, but unlike the Apple iStore you have to go and look for them. Using Python for S60 you can easily write your own if you're any good at Python which is a ridiculously easy programming language to learn.

There is a clone of the iStore now called Ovi, should be pre-installed on the phone but I never use it. There was also a Facebook icon when I got the phone but swiftly removed it, I despise social networking and I hate every single aspect of Facebook. But some people are into FB and they will be glad to know there is an app for it.

Apps I like are PyS60, PuTTY, Talkonaut, Stopwatch (J2ME), Screenshot, i-nigma, FieldTest, SymTorrent :( and possibly a few more.

Music player
This was a let-down, the big problem with it being that there are no dedicated keys to stop music or control the volume - you have to be in the app thats playing the tunes and use the up/down thing on the keypad. It is also hard to exit, since they replaced the 'exit' softkey with 'hide' so it goes into the background by default. Still it's good for playing a few tunes but not better than my 32GB 1st gen iPod Mini.

Quality is... alright. Don't use the headphones you get with the phone, they are utter crap. I use a Sennheiser PXC 300 myself, can still hear a slight hissing noise in the background but it's alright.

USB cable
Micro USB, unfortunately. Wish they'd stick with mini USB cause I have so many of those cables laying around. It works, I can plug it into my linux box and use mass storage for my 8GB card to throw on tunes and presumably also use it to connect to the internet using wvdial or whatever. I havn't tried it, I assume it works. Will update if it doesn't.

It also supports MTP, a Microsoft protocol for uploading songs using WMP and the like, I don't like MTP or the programs that use it so I just use mass storage.

There is no HSPA
But I'm not bothered, for just email and chat ordinary 3G and EDGE is phine. HSPA is slow anyway. It will never be like even a 1mbit DSL line. I get 250MB a month and I only use it for practical stuff (not browsing) so it's grand, loike. Need speed? use Wifi.

File manager
Great app, be sure to use it. You can just browse all the files on your phone (except low level ones you need a hack for those).

Notes/Active notes
Still not sure what the difference is, they both allow you store bits of text (and chat via Bluetooth!).

Dictionary
Great little thing, supports lots of languages if you download them but doesn't list some of the more obscure words. How bad.

Quickoffice
I could never get into writing documents and spreadsheets on my phone, sorry. Not even on the Nokia 9500. I tried but, no wai

Calendar
This has an improved divided-screen layout over that on the E51, so you see the calendar and details for the selected day, a welcome change.

IM
There is a native IM client installed, dunno if this is for jabber or Wireless Village or whatever. I use Talkonaut and a Jabber server I run myself for all my IMing needs.

Radio
Needs headphones connected to work. Typical of Nokias

Voice recorder
Havn't used it, sure it works just fine

Music store/Ovi
I prefer SymTorrent myself. Easier on the pocket :)