Among the most compelling features of the Nokia E62 is its full qwerty keyboard. Ramsey called out the keyboard and display as his favorite features. (We'll get to the display in a moment.) Business users who prefer to use a keyboard on mobile devices, as opposed to a touch screen, will appreciate the size and performance of the E62's keyboard.

Most keys are bigger than the ones on the other phones, and they're housed snugly in the device's face. There's little room for sideways movement, which can lead to typing errors. The key spacing makes it easy to depress a key without hitting another, even if you've got wide fingers.

Four horizontal rows of keys are all the same size, except for the left-most and right-most columns, which are slightly larger, and the entire bottom row of keys, which are smaller and beveled. The bottom row of buttons are a bit too small for our liking, as they're about half the size of the rest of the device keys, except for the elongated space bar, but none is a letter key. The overall functionality of the keyboard makes this factor only a minor inconvenience. This may seem like excessive detail, but you'll spend a lot of time with this keyboard—and it's among the device's most compelling features.

The screen (320 by 240 pixels) is notably bright and clear, and colors are vibrant. That matters when you're using the device's document viewing and editing capabilities, and for Web surfing, because there's more screen space to display content. The display, however, is not touch sensitive; if that matters to you, look elsewhere.

The E62's voice quality was quite strong on calls placed from the Boston area, though we had to turn the volume to its maximum—an issue with all the phones reviewed. Ramsey made calls from the Chicago area and agreed the quality was impressive. However, we noticed a constant buzzing feedback whenever we turned the device's volume to its highest level, especially after staying on a call for any extended period of time.

The Nokia E62 offers the most out-of-the-box options to set up corporate mail. You can link the device to a Microsoft Exchange Server, Lotus Domino and a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) via Good Mobile Messaging, Mail for Exchange, Cingular's Xpress Mail and BlackBerry Connect. For example, Mail for Exchange lets users wirelessly access corporate Outlook e-mail, contact and calendar information, though Exchange Server 2003 SP2 is required. To set up the Nokia E62 with an Exchange Server, the user (or whoever performs the setup) needs the name of the Exchange Server, a user name, password and domain. The setup does vary from one system to another, from "no assistance needed from IT" to the need to activate a BlackBerry Connect plan through Cingular.

Business users who travel internationally will value the E62's overseas functionality. The E62 is a Cingular GSM/EDGE phone, which means that it functions in North America, Europe and Asia.

In our tests, the Nokia E62 had the most impressive battery life of the devices we reviewed. With approximately 12 hours and 45 minutes of talk time—without any e-mail redirect applications running, which can reduce a device's battery life significantly—the E62 blew away its competition. It more than tripled the battery talk time of the Palm Treo 750, which had less than three hours and 40 minutes, and significantly outlasted even the number-two ranked device for talk time: the T-Mobile Dash, which had just under 11 hours.

Another strength of the E62 is its document viewing and editing capabilities. You can view documents in Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF, and edit existing Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. The E62 is the only phone we reviewed that offered the ability to edit PowerPoint presentations. Though none of the CIOs who evaluated phones for this review said that document management was a necessity, users who want this capability on the go will find the E62 to be one of their best options.

Security isn't an afterthought. The Nokia E62 keyboard can be locked while not in use. A PIN code can lock the SIM card (or "SmartChip" in Nokia's terminology) or disable the device if a new SmartChip is inserted. A secondary PIN2 code can lock specific device functions, and users can set a predefined text message to remotely disable the device. The phone can be set to block entry once three consecutive erroneous passwords are keyed in, and that block can be circumvented only with the personal unlocking key number, which can be obtained from a service provider.

Depending on your mail server, the E62 can offer various levels of IT security based on the specific safeguards administrators have applied. For instance, because the E62 can connect to corporate mail clients using the BlackBerry Connect service, many IT policies available in an organization's BES can be applied individually to E62 users.

The Nokia E62 has a few other features that bear examination—and appreciation.

A dedicated e-mail key's sole purpose is to lead users to their e-mail inboxes with a single click, no matter which application they're in. (The T-Mobile Dash has a similar e-mail key.) That'll be useful for business users who employ a smartphone mainly for messaging.

The E62 lets you display the device's screen during meetings via compatible projectors or projection systems, using a wireless connection such as Bluetooth. Drivers for the compatible projector must be downloaded to the device, but once it's all installed, it takes only a few clicks to display the screen via projector.

The default Web browser on the Nokia E62 is the HTML 4, WAP 2.0 Nokia S60. Combined with the large display, it was the most functional we reviewed. You use the device's left action key to go to the address bar, create and access bookmarks, view history, as well as zoom in and out and modify a webpage's font size. A cursor enables users to click wherever they want on any given webpage—unique to the E62. It's particularly valuable since many Internet sites are still not optimized for mobile devices, and therefore sometimes appear jumbled and disjointed. The Nokia browser's cursor allowed us to easily click on any section of any page we desired and led to speedier Web browsing. Whenever you click on the E62's right action key while browsing the Internet, you're shown a page with small screen shots of the webpages you most recently visited. The joystick becomes a toggle between screens, and it really improves Web surfing.

The Nokia E62 includes built-in support for the AIM, MSN Messenger and Yahoo Messenger services, and each can easily be accessed with two clicks from the device's home screen. Only a screen name and password are required to sign in to IM accounts, and the device's large keyboard is particularly suitable for messaging. Though the E62 is not the only device we reviewed that supports IM services out of the box—the Dash also supports three different IM applications—no third-party applications were required, which means there was no need to download additional programs.

But nothing is perfect.

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