Nokia E60 review

The E60 is tri-band and so suitable for international travel, and it supports a huge range of mobile email services of the kind companies might use to send updates out to handsets. It also supports ordinary POP3 and IMAP email for those of us without company networks to feed us.

The S60 v3 operating system incorporates some great smart phone software, and there is an awful lot going on here. You get software on board for viewing and editing documents in Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint -- though don't expect all features to be supported -- and for viewing PDF files. Pre-installed software also lets you export the E60's screen to a data projector via Bluetooth and print too.

The PC Suite software lets you synchronise the E60 with contacts and diary on your main computer if that is to your taste.

If all this sounds a bit too businessy for you, consider the built-in Wi-Fi. You can use this to access the Web via a Wi-Fi network, either your own or a hotspot, but also you can use it to make free phone calls over the Internet. Unusually, Nokia even gives an estimated battery life for VoIP calls -- between 2.5 and 2.7 hours.

There is a music player, but weirdly Nokia doesn't bother to include stereo headphones. If you want to use this handset for listening to music you are going to need to invest in a set, and the proprietary connector means you'll need to make sure you get a set that is compatible with that. There is no FM radio, which we think is a shame.

Performance
We had no trouble making and receiving voice calls with the E60, or with browsing the Web using both 3G and Wi-Fi.

The loudspeaker is very loud indeed, and when we tested music quality with a stereo headset borrowed from another Nokia handset we felt this to be perfectly good.

We did a battery rundown test by asking the E60 to play continuous music with its screen forced on and got a shade more than 8 hours of tunes before the battery died.

That is above average, but during real-world testing we saw the six bars that indicate a full charge slip to just three bars in the course of 24 hours as we used the E60 for a mix of voice calls, Web browsing and some use of the Wi-Fi connection. We didn't use any of these features excessively, and we'd imagine that in everyday life you might want to administer daily charging.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Kate Macefield