This post will be all about the enhancements and software customizations I have seen on the E66. Pretty neat improvements and new features added...

General Feature Enhancements

• Automatic Screen Rotation, depending on how the phone is held. A pleasing fading transition takes place when the display orientation is changed. This is a nice feat when viewing pictures or browsing the web.
  
• Power-saving feature where the screen goes completely blank, as if the phone is turned off, after a period of time. Holding down the dpad will show the current date and profile, and a large time display (white on black, with back light) until the dpad is released. Way better to check the time than my N82's hard-to-read power saver.
  
• Notification light, where a blinking light surrounds the center of the dpad when you have unread messages or missed calls. This feature can be turned off if preferred.
  
• Breathing light, where a soft fading light surrounds the dpad for every 10 seconds (as if the phone is breathing) when left unused for a period of time. Adds an elegant touch, and looks good at night. This feature also can be turned off to save some battery life.
  
• Flip to silence alert sounds through the aid of the built-in accelerometer. But eh? Makes no sense. Why not just press the 'Stop' or 'Cancel' button, you ask. Yes, I actually thought the same. But I find this feature useful every morning, when the phone alarms to wake me up ;-). Too sleepy that I am, it's way easier to just grab the phone and flip it to silence the alarm, instead of using my fingers to feel and press the correct button. Flipping automatically snoozes the alarm unlike stopping it if I accidentally pressed the wrong key.
• Full Screen web browsing both in portrait and landscape mode is possible.
  
• 2-step scrolling acceleration. Only 1-step on the N82 which is a pain on loooong lists.
  
• Remote Lock feature, as the name implies, allows the user to lock the device remotely. If turned on, the user should set a lock message (at least 5 characters, case sensitive) . In case of loss, the user can lock the device by sending the defined message to it. If remote locking is successful, a confirmation message will be received by the sender, stating that the phone and memory card has been locked.
  

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Stand-by / Home Screen

There are two different home screens that the user can personalize: Business mode which you can choose to set up with shortcuts for work-related emails, calendar entries and applications; and Personal mode for personal email account, music and other applications enjoyed during free time. The handset's theme and wallpaper automatically changes depending on the selected mode. Such a nifty feature I would love to have on my N82.

And I was surprised when I learned that the user can now modify which shortcut bars will be displayed on the home screen! So if you are like me, you can opt to remove the Search bar and WiFi Scanning options from the standby. Or if you prefer, only meeting entries or to-do notes are displayed on the screen. Arghh.., I wish this would also be built-in on the N82.

Another gem here is the notification icons for missed calls, new messages and new voice mails. A pop-up menu is displayed when you highlight an icon where you are given more options. To find out more about this, check this video-look made by Mike for the E71 which also features this amazing home-screen.

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Messaging

Date is displayed beside each messages on the list. If the message is received or sent during the current day, time is showed instead. Such a simple yet a very handy feature. There's also a new setting, Folder View where the user can choose whether the messages are displayed in 1 or 2 lines. See screenshots below:

Instead of reading, you can also opt to just listen to your messages through the built in text-to-speech feature. Highlight a message, hit Options > Listen and the feature triggers. On the home screen, a long press on the left soft key launches the message reader as well and reads all new messages that you may have. I don't have a need for this feature. But it's there so I tried it. More often than not, I find it hard to figure out the words that the speaking voice is reading, as the voice is nearly muffled and intonation is sometimes improper. Adding the fact that English is not the mother language here so most of the text messages I receive, are spelled out by the speaking voice, instead of reading them out. Even with email messages I have, which are mostly English in content, the way the speaking voice applies pauses, stops and punctuations make it sound annoying for me. But hey, this is a welcome addition which other people may find useful, dealing with important messages while driving and some other similar situations.

Also, printing messages is also possible on this mobile device, through WiFi or Bluetooth connections. You can print text messages, email, web pages, images, calendar entries, notes and contacts. You can set the paper size, orientation, page margins, headers and footers. I was not able to try this feature, but here are screen shots of how it goes on the phone:

Since this device is targeted to business-oriented individuals to whom email is completely an important functionality, I expected to see a totally different and a much improved messaging application than the N82 has currently. But I was disappointed.

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Contacts

There's the "smart dialing" feature which displays a list of contact entries when you start to dial numbers on the home screen. This feature interprets the dialed numbers as T9 text input and updates the list matching the equivalent text. For example, when you dial numbers 6 and 2 on the home screen, contact entries matching "ma" are listed. A pop-up menu is displayed (scrolling from right to left) when you highlight one of the results and press the right of the dpad. This menu contains contacts-related actions for the currently highlighted contact entry. This pop-up menu is also available on the Contacts application itself.



Also, depending on the network, conference call of up to 6 participants is supported.

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Calendar

Viewing options were enhanced with some smooth scrolling and tooltip transitions (TaTs in da haus?). Presentation of calendar entries is tweaked for a faster and easier overview, and for a better viewing pleasure. In months view, an outline of all entries are displayed as a list. The list smoothly scrolls up and down if there are many calendar entries for the highlighted date. This new calendar application really outshines the one that other Nokias have. I never thought the s60 calendar can be this good.

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Darn, if only some of these software improvements will be applied for the N82 as well, like the home screen and smart dialing, that would be awesome. I still hope, T_T.

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