The S65 is very much a multimedia phone. Pressing and holding the key on the right side of the handset brings you to the 1.3-megapixel (1,280x960-pixel) camera, which takes pictures in five resolutions with decent colour balance. It's worth adjusting the white-balance setting for indoor or outdoor use, as colours tend to be slightly richer than with the automatic setting. You can make basic adjustments without entering the menu; simply move the joystick left or right to adjust the brightness and up or down to adjust the 4x digital zoom. You can also record as much as 30 seconds of video at a time in 3GP format at 15fps. Don't worry about where you'll store all these files; the S65 comes with a 32MB MultiMediaCard, and you can always purchase a higher-capacity card.
For serious mobile shutterbugs, the S65 includes a photo editor that allows you to rotate, crop, copy, and paint, as well as add frames and effects to your snapshots. With the editor, you can save pictures as bitmap files and copy photos that are saved on the camera to the MMC, or vice versa. The editor is rather sluggish, however, so your best bet is to save pictures to the MMC and edit them on your computer. The S65 is also AOL IM-compatible, although typing messages on the cramped keypad will quickly grow tiresome. About the only feature this phone doesn't include is MP3 support. You can personalise the phone with a variety of screensavers, wallpaper, colours, and sounds.
Performance
Call quality was generally good, especially outdoors. A word of caution about using this phone indoors: it can interfere with TV and radio broadcast signals. We sat about 3m away from our television and could hear a distinct hum in the background that disappeared as soon as we moved the phone a few feet further away. We also sometimes got a buzzing sound from our PC when the phone was too close. And the speakerphone isn't the loudest, so while it's sufficient for use in an office, it probably won't be loud enough to use in a car.
As for battery life, we reached just more than 4.5 hours of talk time, a bit short of the maximum rating of 5 hours, but certainly better than acceptable. Siemens claims a maximum standby time of 250 hours, or a little more than 10 days. Our unit lasted a week before the battery ran out of juice.
Edited by Kent German
Additional editing by Mary Lojkine
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