cingular_e62-copy.jpgTwo weeks ago, I sold my Treo 650 and ordered a Nokia e62.I’m not sure how I stumbled onto this phone, but eventually began reading raving reviews about the phone’s design and the s60 3rd edition Symbian OS. I know that an attractive pricepoint on eBay and the phone’s “newness” all contributed. After waiting like a kid at Christmas for the FedEx delivery person to arrive, I finally had it in my hands.

First impressions
The phone is gorgeous. It looks like the hot cousin of a Blackberry. Comfortable to hold. Great looking keyboard. The display was crisp and colorful and HUGE.

While sitting at my desk shortly after it arrived, I heard some weird music coming out of the speakers on my desk. I was surprised when someone yelled at me to turn off my ringer, dug deep in my pocket and retrieved the phone and answered the call. The quality blew me away. The call was crystal clear. I completed the phone call and was absolutely ecstatic about my purchase. I decided I would set up my email next.

Email Connectivity
When I did read the reviews of this phone, some of the reviewers complained about slightly slow transitions between programs. I had experienced some slowdowns with my Treo in the past and had assumed that it couldn’t be worse than those. I was wrong.

I first noticed the sluggishness of the phone when I began the process of setting up my email accounts. I started navigating the menus and entering in my account details. What would normally amount to a half-second delay on the Treo seemed annoyingly long at 2 seconds. Sometimes screens would take 5-7 seconds to appear. When setting up my email accounts, I had many pages of options to fill in. In the end, I’m sure that over 2 minutes of the 10 minutes it took to set up my email account was spent staring at the screen wanting something to happen. This was VERY annoying.

I have two accounts that I check: a personal IMAP account and work IMAP account. With the Treo, I had used a program called ChatterEmail which provided near-push responsiveness with my email. After I got my email accounts set up, I enabled ‘automatic retrieval’ in the options. This setting allowed me to check my email every 2 minutes. It wasn’t instantaneous like with the Treo, but I figured it would be fine. Had this worked, yes it would have been fine. But, like many devices out there, I think this device over-promised and under-delivered. I started to receive emails at somewhat regular intervals. It was odd, sometimes a message wouldn’t come through until 15 minutes after I had received it on my laptop. Eventually, the mail application began crashing. It would just hang. I did find that the Symbian OS has a nice interface to kill errant processes… quite convenient in this scenario.

During the entire time of using the phone for email, I would experience the following problems:

  • The ‘auto-retrieval’ functionality would toggle itself off, leaving me thinking that the phone was checking my email when it wasn’t.
  • The mail application would freeze up and become entirely unresponsive.
  • Mail would not actually be checked in the time specified.

If it didn’t crash, and the auto-retrieval worked, I could use this phone. There were still a dozen things about the mail application which I couldn’t stand. The most painful was that, in order to mark a message as read, I had to either ‘click’ on a message, download it from the server, wait for it to load, and return to the message index (about 30-40 seconds), or go into a contextual menu and click ‘mark as read’ (which was about 9 button presses and about 10 seconds). To clean out an inbox of 5 messages, would take me about 3-4 minutes by the time I entered the mail program and had deleted, marked as read, or read these messages. If I want to reply, you can add into the equation another minute plus the the time it takes for you to write the message. So, if you had 10 messages and wanted to reply to 3 and read the others, you are looking at about 15 minutes just to fire off a few emails.

Phone functionality
At first I was VERY impressed with the phone as a phone. I still think the sound-quality is better than any other device I’ve used (landline included). My only complaint, and it’s a large one, is that I have had a couple equations where someone is sending me SMS messages and they don’t arrive until hours later. I would think this to be a carrier problem, but I never experienced this on my Treo and the other Cingular users in the room both sent and received messages without problems. I had the same issue with voicemail notifications.

Final thoughts
I think the phone is a great phone that has rich email capabilities for a casual user. However, this phone is not the Blackberry-killer that it has been made out to be. I would recommend this phone for someone who likes to know that, if they need to, they can still read and respond to email when they aren’t around a computer. For professionals or email junkies, don’t get this phone, stick with your Blackberry, Treo, or WM phone.

This phone is going back today. I will miss looking at it.

Update: I’ve re-acquired a Treo 650. I am still thinking about trying out a BlackJack, but for the moment, I will stick with the tried-and-true Treo for the moment.