And here comes the Nokia E65. Summing it up in one line is pretty easy – "it’s the Enterprise Device that has a slider keypad". Which is an improvement on years gone by, when we’d differentiate new phones by the things they leave out of (or put into) the design – now we simply tell everyone where the marketing department has decided to target it.
Actually, this is a strength – now that Symbian OS and the hardware that runs it are all essentially available at a sensible cost (in time, materials, and design), it’s now accepted that all the devices should carry all the features (it’s interesting to note that all the Enterprise devices announced at 3GSM today all come with cameras - something we were originally told that the market just did not want.
While this makes it easier for the power-user (every phone has everything that they would practically need) and it means that their objects of lust are a little easier to predict (as I hold back Steve and Rafe while trying to get to an AAS E90 review unit), it does worry me that the sheer volume of choice is going to be confusing in the market – exactly what Nokia doesn’t want to happen.
If we take the E65 and put it next to the N80 (last years object du jour) we can see that, essentially, we have the same phone. QVGA screen. Wifi. VoIP possibilities. A slider. Hardware-wise there is very little to draw between these phones. Which means it is going to be all down to the marketing.
But what I like about the E65 is is the physical simplicity of it. It looks like a phone – there’s no fancy keyboard (and to a lot of people, Qwerty is fancy). There’s a simplicity to the external design when closed and open. It’s not going to scare anyone away when they pick it up from their IT department. Given the focus that Nokia have put on the active standby screen in the press release for the unit, they’re picking up on this as a key selling point as well. We could well be looking at the ‘default’ E-Series device here, the one that fills the order books in Finland while the geeks, power users and hardcore elite focus on the E61i and the E90.
Ewan Spence, 12 Feb 2007
