The Business-Savvy Smartphone Review: Nokia E62, BlackBerry Pearl, T-Mobile Dash, Palm Treo 750

CIO compares four of the hottest smartphones available, from the perspective of four experienced IT executives.

Nokia E62 (Cingular)

With a large, full qwerty keyboard, thin profile and impressive messaging features, the Nokia E62 has quickly become a smartphone-fan favorite. But is it a suitable business phone for IT executives? Yes—with some caveats.

In September 2006, Nokia released the Cingular E62, an evolution of the E61 specifically tailored for the American market. The E62 is practically identical in appearance to its E61 sibling; they're both large, thin slabs of matte silver metal, with the same form factor. Both have a large, full qwerty keyboard, thin profile and impressive messaging features. However, the E62's guts are significantly different. The most notable modifications are the lack of Wi-Fi support and the fact that the phone is not a 3G device—two features that helped propel the E61 to popularity in Europe.

Though Nokia caught some criticism for the elimination of Wi-Fi and the lack of 3G, the E62's robust messaging and Web-surfing applications overshadowed the missing features. With e-mail options for a variety of e-mail clients and a unique Nokia S60 browser, the Symbian 9.1a-based device has quickly earned a reputation in the smartphone community as a "Q killer." But does the E62 deserve the title?

To get the real deal on the E62 and its value to business users, we asked Stephen Ramsey to give the device a test drive. Ramsey is principal at Cleveland, Ohio-based Brulant, a consultancy that focuses largely on e-commerce initiatives, and former CIO of Rogers Enterprises, the parent company of Midwest retail chain Rogers & Hollands Jewelers. Though he's not currently in charge of smartphone deployment at Brulant, Ramsey did select and issue smartphones to his staffers at Rogers Enterprise and is a smartphone user himself. Ramsey's current phone of choice is the Motorola Moto Q, which he employs as both a business and personal device.

Bottom Line
The Nokia E62's wide, full qwerty keyboard and bright display, combined with its strong voice quality, robust messaging feature pack and office suite, make it a fully functional device for business users who focus on messaging. On the downside, its large, slab-like form factor makes the Nokia E62 too big to carry around without a holster or bag, and its Symbian operating system can be sluggish and unresponsive.

Among the other things we liked was the Nokia E62's document viewing and editing capabilities. Also, its impressive battery life—the longest of all the smartphones we evaluated—gives users more than 12 hours of talk time and multiple days of standby time. If you type lots of e-mails or other messages and prefer a keyboard to a touch screen, you don't mind the device's large package and you are patient enough to deal with the Symbian OS, the Nokia E62 is a great option.

But it's not a great option for everyone. Ramsey said he would not deploy the phone across an enterprise because of configuration issues and difficulties in linking it to Microsoft Exchange Server. Ramsey also found the device's operating system to be notably less responsive than his Windows Mobile-based Moto Q. Faced with a choice between the Moto Q and the E62, he'll stick with the Q as both a business and a personal phone.

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