Nokia E62 Smartphone (Cingular)

by Nokia

Product Details

• Item Weight: 1 pounds
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• ASIN: B000JCT8WU
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (22 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #251,537 in Cell Phones & Accessories (See Top 100 in Cell Phones & Accessories)

Product Description

Amazon.com Product Description

BlackBerry lovers, there's a new device on the block, and it packs all the functionality of a quad-band Nokia smartphone into a design that business users have grown to love. The device packs EDGE data capabilities, Bluetooth, a miniSD memory card slot, and support for just about every email protocol you can think of -- including BlackBerry Connect and Goodlink. All this and much more is packed into a thin, sleek, and stylish exterior that's perfect for the discerning professional. The Nokia E62 is the perfect way to take advantage of all that Cingular service has to offer.

Thin, light, and powerful, the E62 makes a great office on the go.

Design
The E62 goes with a tried and true design that makes it easy to communicate at a moment's notice. The large, 320 x 240 screen supports a whopping 16.7 million colors, while a QWERTY keyboard just below the screen makes typing out emails, SMS messages, notes, presentations, and more a breeze. A center "thumb stick" allows you to quickly navigate the E62's menus and features, while soft keys on either side of the stick make it easy to quickly access important phone and productivity functions -- all of which make the E62 a snap to use one-handed. On the bottom of the phone, you'll find a dedicated headset jack and a mini-usb connector. The phone's charging port and infrared sensor are also located on the bottom of the phone. Under the battery cover, you'll find a hot-swappable miniSD slot, as well. The device ships with 75 MB of internal memory, as well as a 64 MB miniSD card.

Calling Features
The E62's address book is only limited by the amount of available memory, and it can store multiple phone numbers, as well as physical and email addresses. Meanwhile, the E62's built-in speakerphone makes it easy to talk without having the phone to your ear, while speaker-independent voice dialing makes it easy to dial numbers with the sound of your voice. Polyphonic ringtones are included, and you can use your favorite music or recorded voices as ringtones. You can also download additional MP3 music ringtones from Cingular's MEdia Net service. Plus, picture IDs let you assign specific ringtones to particular callers. If you want to keep things discreet, there's a vibrate mode, too. And, of course, the phone's Bluetooth connectivity means that your favorite Bluetooth headset is fully compatible.

Messaging, Internet and Tools
With support for the MMS (multimedia messaging service), the E62 can send picture, video and text messages. Instant messaging is also supported, and the phone ships with a built-in email client that supports POP3, IMAP, and SMTP protocols, as well as Microsoft Office-based email attachments. A robust set of push email and wireless synchronization solutions are provided, including Activesync for Exchange and Outlook, Intellisync, BlackBerry Connect, and Goodlink.

With BlackBerry service plans from Cingular, you can receive emails instantaneously from up to 10 email accounts (personal and enterprise). With BlackBerry push technology, you don't need to retrieve your email. Instead, BlackBerry devices are designed to remain on and continuously connected to the wireless network, allowing you to be discreetly notified as new email arrives. Support is also built-in for viewing email attachments (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, WordPerfect, and PDF formats).

Getting on the Internet is easy with the E62. It supports the GPRS data protocol, as well as high-speed EDGE wireless data service. When used with a Cingular data plan and the phone's Bluetooth data capability, the phone can be used as a wireless modem for laptops and PDAs.

Just the right dimensions for mobile productivity.

The E62's innovative built-in browser, one of many enhancements included with the device's new Symbian operating system -- known as Series 60 9.1 Version 3 -- offers full HTML viewing as well as support for page zooming, CSS, javascript and other technologies that will bring you very close to a desktop PC browsing experience.

The E62 supports PC synchronization standards via USB or Bluetooth, which means you can manage and synchronize contacts, calendars and other data with your PC. Nokia's PC Suite application makes this process a breeze. A number of handy software tools are bundled with the device, including a voice memo recorder, a calculator, and an alarm clock. Productivity tools bundled with the E62 include a word processor, a presentation viewer/editor, a spreadsheet viewer/editor, PDF viewer, and a zip file manager. The office applications are compatible with the most common features of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel (MS Office 97 or later). Robust contact and calendar applications are also included.

Entertainment
You can mix your business with quite a bit of pleasure, as the E62 supports playback of MP3 and AAC audio files, as well as streaming and stored video files. Connect a headset, load up your tunes and videos to a memory card, and you've got some serious entertainment in your hand. Picture effects and custom screensavers, as well as backgrounds and themes, can be set up to fit your personality. And don't forget that the E62 is a powerful gaming companion with support for Java and Symbian games.

Vital Statistics
The Nokia E62 weighs 5 ounces and measures 4.61 x 2.74 x 0.55 inches. Its lithium-ion battery is rated at up to 7 hours of digital talk time, and up to 264 hours of digital standby time. It runs on the 850/900/1800/1900 MHz GSM/GPRS/EDGE frequencies.

Product Description

This high-end business email device is Nokia's first direct shot at the BlackBerry. Key features include a slim profile, full QWERTY keyboard, S60 smartphone platform, EDGE high-speed data, Bluetooth, and a miniSD card slot. Other features include quad-band GSM, speakerphone, full HTML web browser, speaker-independent voice dialing, and music player.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

95 of 98 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Smart Phone/PDA - not so smart Service provider, October 12, 2006

By 

Venu (North Carolina) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nokia E62 Smartphone (Cingular) (Wireless Phone)

[Since I really scoured the web researching the E62 before I got one from Cingular... I owe it to the web/usenet community to post my experiences!]

This is a good looking PDA phone. My family is subscribed to a Cingular Family plan, so I was looking for a good PDA phone from Cingular, rather than go thru the hassle of switching carriers to get the juicy BB Pearl or an EVDO offering... and when the E62 came out, it appeared to have everything I needed in a PDA phone (looks and features). I knew it didn't have WiFi (disappointing), but, well, I thought with one of their Media Bundles, and with all the hype about EDGE, I hoped the E62 will prove to be a convenient and efficient PDA phone.

There are three ways you should look at this phone when considering using with Cingular.
1. As a standalone device.
2. Cingular's data plans that are suitable for this PDA/phone.
3. The usability of E62 when combined with Cingular's data plans.

There are too many aspects of this device, and I will not be able to touch all, but I'll try to update this review a few more times after submitting this.

1. As a standalone device.
Beautiful screen. 16million colors. The PDA itself is very sharp looking, even with the Cingular stamp on it. The QWERTY keboard is really awesome. Wider than the Treo and very comfortable to type. If you haven't used Palm OS, then you'll love the general interface as well. But if you are used to Palm (or maybe even the Pocket PC), Symbian desktop needs a little getting used to. Switching from app to app has some delays (2 to 5 seconds sometimes). The Menu is confusing at times. Will need to spend a few hours to really get to know to use this device efficiently.

The E62 does not have a scroll wheel; nor does it have a touch screen. It has a joystick, which is quite convenient to move the cursor on the screen. I still felt a clickable scroll wheel on the side would be a good addition.

The built-in browser is Ok, but very confusing to save bookmarks, and to go to a new URL. The calendar is good for a new PDA user. But if you are used to Datebook or Datebook+, this calendar is very simplistic. I installed the mobile google maps app. Looks good on this PDA. But, an irritating popup comes up everytime asking "Allow application Google Maps to use network and send or recieve data?". Even if I click "Yes", it doesn't remember... and will ask again in a few seconds as google tries to get new data when you move in the map. I didn't find an easy way to persist this setting. This irristating popup happen for other apps too. (pop email for example). So right there, that's a big negative. Some of your browsing experience becomes unpleasant right away because of this stuff.

Browsing to sites such as google news is not that bad. The page loading times take anywhere from 4 to 12 seconds (using Cingular's EDGE). A little long for my taste.

The E62 comes with an Instant Messaging App for Yahoo, MSN and hotmail. I tried Yahoo IM. The outgoing messages go quickly. Incoming messages have a big lag. Upto 10 seconds, and sometimes even 30 secondss. So, this is not very interactive for fast typers... and high speed IMers! (For me, personally, the delays were really disconcerting) Still, this could be useful if are stuck in a train (with good EDGE coverage!) or a long line at the Drivers license office!
Personally, I felt that EDGE is all hype and it is not really super fast. I hear good things from the EV-DO camp (that Verizon provides). People who compared EVDO with EDGE have consistently said that EVDO is blazing fast.

Very sleek and thin and light weight. It can slip easily from your hands though. Does not have an ergonomic rubber grip or anything of the sort on the sides. A good 3rd party case should alleviate this problem. (If you are looking for a Blackberry type holster, no luck. Cingular doesn't provide any case for this phone) (Blackberry users are used to their BB behaving differently when it senses that it is in the holster. The E62 has no such intelligence)

Voice quality is Excellent. 5 stars on this one. Speaker phone is beautiful, with good polyphonic support. Very convenient to quickly record audio memos too.

Contacts/Addressbook is Ok. Not as good as Palm's or Blackberry's.

Excellent battery life, even with using the multimedia features. I haven't timed it, but after almost a full day of intermittently using and experimenting with the PDA, the battery only went down by a notch and a half.

2. Cingular's data plan.
Whoever is heading the Cingular's Marketing department, hasn't done enough to know the prime Customer for this product. I got this phone not for business use, but for regular personal use. Going by their web page, I believed I could sign up for Cingular's Media Max 200 bundle for 19.99/month (unlimited web, 200 text msgs). The operator first added the Media Max, and once she realized I had the E62, basically said, sorry, you can't have this plan... she then proposed what she saw as the only plan on her screen - A PDAConnect plan for 59.99 (unlimited). This is completely out of sync with Cingular's web page where there is no "PDAConnect" plan. They have DataConnect plans ranging from 19.99 to 44.99. But the Cingular operator (she was very nice though) just could not see any of those plans from her screen. Finally she found the DataConnect plan for 44.99 somewhere (but not the other cheaper ones) and put that on my plan.

At this point, for a personal user, I'm wondering if the 44.99 is worth it. Well, if the browsing experience is quick and fast, it could be. But the browsing experience is not that great, as I mentioned above. (I also plan to download the Opera mini and see if that part of web usage becomes better).

Cingular should prominently inform customers of compatible data plans for this phone before the purchase of the phone itself. I got in for a bad surprise on this one.


3. Nokia E62 with Cingular:
Since the EDGE "high speed" Cingular's network isn't that great... the lack of built-in WiFi is a BIG drawback on the E62. (You can buy an unlocked E61 which has the WiFi). I found that the EDGE performance varies from place to place. At its fastest, the average web response times are 4 to 8 seconds (and for some pages longer). Some pages just time out. The included browser is Ok, not very great. Most places I go, I see WiFi coverage (libraries, restaurants, coffee shops, work place, and of course home), but poor Edge coverage. The data/web experience with the E62 is very unsatisfactory - it would be much better if it had WiFi support.

If you want to use it as a regular phone, and as a PDA (without a data plan), this is an excellent choice. (with some of the drawbacks I mentioned above; such as: slow switching of apps, slow startup of apps, slippery form factor). Will be good for mp3s (has a miniSD slot supporting 2Gig card), photographs, video. Symbian has some good 3rdParty software available (not as extensive as Palm or PocketPC). btw, the miniSD slot is hidden under the battery cover. So, the card can't easily be popped out. I think some people may like this, but others may want to have easy access to the miniSD card.

If you plan to use the Data plan, I don't recommend it. I have to say that I haven't used the Blackberry Connect or GoodLink on this one, but I don't think having those plans will drastically increase the performance of this device. Having a BB plan could give you good email performance (but then, you should get a Blackberry, which is really awesome for email/calendar and Outlook syncing).

I love this phone, but I am left with a lingering disappointment. I fell in love with this phone even before I bought it :( ... it has a lovely look and an awesome screen, but, but, I may end up returning it to Cingular within the 30 day trial period :( .

Good luck with your choice. I'll try to update this page as I use this phone more. (It's only a day since I got it). Oh, btw, there's a whole fun world of Access Point settings that you *could* get into with this PDA... but that's for another time.... [...].

17 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good phone, OK PDA (six months later), December 21, 2006

By 

R Subramanian "MovieFreak" (Boulder, CO, United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Nokia E62 Smartphone (Cingular) (Wireless Phone)

[edit/update: July 2007, six months later. Music player, miniSD access, bluetooth connectivity and update on the "UGLY".]

I have had this phone for little over a month as of writing. My previous phones were a Motorola v180 and a Sierra Voq (with Windows Mobile). I bought this as a upgrade/contract extension through Amazon, which provides a great price compared to Cingular, even though contract extension disqualifies you for the Amazon rebate.

There are other extensive reviews, so I'll try to keep this to the point:

(with apologies to Sergio Leone and Clint Eastwood)

The Good:
1. GREAT battery life: 4 days with ~4.5h talk time on one charge.
2. Well-designed QWERTY keyboard: excellent for taking notes (get used to the stiff keys).
3. Decent/good call quality.
4. Good build quality (no cheap plastic)
5. Stiff keys - so if the keypad is unlocked and the phone is in your pocket, keys *shouldn't* get pressed (but see Ugly #1 below).
6. MiniSD slot - 2 GB cards are now cheap. EDIT: the miniSD card is EASY TO REMOVE, even if it is physically below the battery. You don't have to remove the battery.
7. It's not Windows (no crashes/freezes so far).
8. Pre-configured for MediaNet access, I just use that to access Gmail/Google Maps.
9. Gmail/Google Maps work and look great, except for Bad #1.
10. Bluetooth (e.g. a headset for Bad #6).
11. Lovely screen.
12. Can sync seamlessly with M$ Outlook, using Nokia's PC Suite (included).
13. Nice Nokia wired headset with answer/end button on the microphone stub. Holding the mic near your mouth helps significantly, though.

14. [UPDATE]The iPhone hubbub made me try out the music playing capabilities (haven't had much success with movies). The Nokia Music Manager is pretty nice, can convert MP3s/AACs to eAACs, which produces - for me - acceptable audio quality at ~1/4th the file size (my MP3s are usually 320 kbps). Useful while biking (mandatory safety warning - I have to pay extra attention to bikes behind me).
15. [UPDATE] I recently got a Sony bluetooth stereo headset DR-BT10X, which works well for music, and seems good/OK for calls.

The Bad: (mostly minor)
1. Cingular has restricted the options for Java applications like Gmail and Google Maps to just "never allow access" and "always ask" - the Nokia manual gives two more options ("always allow" and, I think, "allow this time"). So if you want to move, say, a little to the left on Google maps, you have to agree to allow Google Maps Internet access, and even re-select MediaNet.

2. SLOW opening of applications, sometimes it gets very frustrating, e.g. looking up the address book. UPDATE: This still makes me mad at times...

3. Stiff keys can be a pain.
4. When the keypad is locked, the backlight doesn't come on when you press any key - this can save battery life, but if you want to look at the time, say, you have to unlock the keypad, then lock it again before putting the phone away. But see Good #5.

5. Locking the keypad requires pressing two keys (On the Voq - just press "call end" and hold for a few seconds.)
6. Can't really hold the phone between your ear and shoulder - and it is kind of bulky, which makes it a chore to hold up.
7. Alarm clock actually resides in the Menu\Office\ folder.
8. [UPDATE: See Good #15] Plantronics 340 bluetooth headset - my experience has been less than encouraging with dropped connections, but that could be the headset's fault.
9. I am still trying to figure out a way to rip my non-copy-protected DVDs so I can use the 2 GB MiniSD card and the lovely screen.
10. No WiFi (The non-Cingular Nokia E61 has WiFi).
11. I have never had a camera phone, so lack of a camera doesn't bother me - much.

The Ugly:
1. The Saturday before I left for a conference, the phone was in my trouser pocket, with keypad locked. But when I bent over or sat down, the phone mysteriously turned off! This happened 3 or 4 times that day. I took my Voq along as a backup, but thankfully the problem hasn't recurred. UPDATE: This has recurred on occasion, so DON'T BEND OVER while the phone is in your trouser pocket!

Overall, I am happy with the phone, and mostly also with the PDA. The Nokia doesn't have the narrow form factor of the Sierra Voq (see my review there), but the great screen and long battery life more than make up for it. Now if only Cingular would stop crippling this phone...

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Good, The Bad and the Mega-Ugly, March 3, 2007

By 

SManSF "Silicon VAlley" (SF, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Nokia E62 Smartphone (Cingular) (Wireless Phone)

Okay, so here's what good:

a) keyboard kicks butt. Dont listen to anyone who says different. They are clueless SureType loving nuts. Hey dont listen to me, try it yourself.

b) The phone is relatively slim for other devices in its category. Exhibit A: Blackberry 9700.

c) User interface is mostly awesome. Phone calls are placed at the forefront of the UI, as they should be. Look at Tmobile MDA for an excellent example of how NOT to design a phone.

d) supports BlackBerry Connect as well as Good messaging. Sweet!!

Okay, over to the bad:

a) Sloooooow. The damn device is so freaking slow. It makes the TMobile MDA and the Treo look good, which takes the lot since those devices set the performance bar pretty damn low.

b) No Wi-Fi, No 3G, No Camera.

c) Cingular (of course). The IM client that ships with the E62 USES ONE TEXT MESSAGE FOR ONE IM. Do not get ripped off by using the IM client, Cingular decided it was okay to screw over customers with humonguous text message bills (I sent out 900 texts in one month unwittingly on account of the IM client) even though they already pay upwards of $45 dollars for the data channel. What a scam!!! I downloaded Agile Messenger for 20 bucks and use the data pipes for IM. Take that, evil carrier!

The Ugly:

a) Slow. Oh god, it's so slow.