Do not buy this unit - you'll only be disappointed. I call it a Smoker's Delight. You perform an operation, go out and grab a smoke, then come back in to see if the device is finished. Quick summary: It's very slow and secondly, quite buggy.
Frame of reference for comparison is against the Blackberry (multiple models). I was using the E62 configured with the Microsoft Exchange client software for email. When receiving emails, the Blackberry will receive the email with 5-10 seconds of sending. The Outlook client on my PC takes an additional 25 seconds to update and the the E62 and additional 25 seconds. Emails on the E62 arrive in 45-60 seconds. This is more or less acceptable.
Reading email is where it breaks down. On average, after selecting an email to read, it will be 6 seconds before it shows up. Every once in a while, it only took 4 seconds and in some cases, it took over 30 seconds to open the message! As an experiment, I turned off the wireless to see if the unit was fetching the mail in real-time via wireless and I can say with surety, that 100% of the slowness is local to the unit. There are no differences in read time with or without wireless enabled. By the time 6 seconds is up, I've grown bored and have already forgotten the subject of the email that I selected.
The unit has locked up numerous times. Sometimes, I can wait it out, sometimes I was able to power the unit down and back on and other times, I had to remove the battery to recover.
Scrolling while reading email via the joystick is awkward. It jumps rather than doing a smooth scrolling. So, if you had a paragraph that would fit on the screen and wanted to center it, you can't. There are no shortcut keys to get to the top of the message or bottom of the message. Same with the main email header list. If you scroll up from the newest message, you are looking at the oldest message and there's no indication that you've just made a time warp jump. Other PDAs and Blackberries appear to be 6 generations of software ahead of Nokia. This is completely unusable for a power user.
In case you are dead set suffering with this device, let me give you some positives. It has a nice Golf game loaded. The web broswer, although very slow at processing the pages, is very nice. When browsing a normal sized page, it shows you a thumbnail of the whole page so that you can see where you are looking when scrolling left and right. History also shows you previously visited pages as thumbnails too. These are nice features. I can say that the packet data downloads are blindingly fast for a mobile device. It was impressive. However, once you get the data quickly, then it breaks out a pocket calculator to crunch the data and so the experience is painfully slow.
Battery life. It didn't hold a charge for 24 hours. Batteries ran out overnight after a charge that was done around 2-3 PM that same day. This is a brand new phone! How does a vendor release a new phone with a USB connector, but not let you charge it via USB???? You need this special adapter with a 2.5mm plug to charge your phone. Yet another cable to carry around vs the ubiquitious USB cables.
Frame of reference for comparison is against the Blackberry (multiple models). I was using the E62 configured with the Microsoft Exchange client software for email. When receiving emails, the Blackberry will receive the email with 5-10 seconds of sending. The Outlook client on my PC takes an additional 25 seconds to update and the the E62 and additional 25 seconds. Emails on the E62 arrive in 45-60 seconds. This is more or less acceptable.
Reading email is where it breaks down. On average, after selecting an email to read, it will be 6 seconds before it shows up. Every once in a while, it only took 4 seconds and in some cases, it took over 30 seconds to open the message! As an experiment, I turned off the wireless to see if the unit was fetching the mail in real-time via wireless and I can say with surety, that 100% of the slowness is local to the unit. There are no differences in read time with or without wireless enabled. By the time 6 seconds is up, I've grown bored and have already forgotten the subject of the email that I selected.
The unit has locked up numerous times. Sometimes, I can wait it out, sometimes I was able to power the unit down and back on and other times, I had to remove the battery to recover.
Scrolling while reading email via the joystick is awkward. It jumps rather than doing a smooth scrolling. So, if you had a paragraph that would fit on the screen and wanted to center it, you can't. There are no shortcut keys to get to the top of the message or bottom of the message. Same with the main email header list. If you scroll up from the newest message, you are looking at the oldest message and there's no indication that you've just made a time warp jump. Other PDAs and Blackberries appear to be 6 generations of software ahead of Nokia. This is completely unusable for a power user.
In case you are dead set suffering with this device, let me give you some positives. It has a nice Golf game loaded. The web broswer, although very slow at processing the pages, is very nice. When browsing a normal sized page, it shows you a thumbnail of the whole page so that you can see where you are looking when scrolling left and right. History also shows you previously visited pages as thumbnails too. These are nice features. I can say that the packet data downloads are blindingly fast for a mobile device. It was impressive. However, once you get the data quickly, then it breaks out a pocket calculator to crunch the data and so the experience is painfully slow.
Battery life. It didn't hold a charge for 24 hours. Batteries ran out overnight after a charge that was done around 2-3 PM that same day. This is a brand new phone! How does a vendor release a new phone with a USB connector, but not let you charge it via USB???? You need this special adapter with a 2.5mm plug to charge your phone. Yet another cable to carry around vs the ubiquitious USB cables.