Nokia E62 for Cingular

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I'm not that crazy—I set it to check every 15 minutes, and only between 9am and 12 midnight. Annoyingly, it often forgets to check, sometimes for hours at a time. That's not a deal breaker for casual e-mail checkers, but it is something that needs improvement. Hopefully no one will e-mail to say that your house is on fire.

The E62 has a pretty smart browser. Type in a website and on the E62's screen you glimpse just a corner of the page. Use the joystick to move a cursor around on the page. Fast movement brings up a thumbnail image - a rough but handy treasure map showing everything you might want. After you've browsed a few pages, click the Back button and you'll see thumbnails of the pages you 've visited, so you can quickly pick the one you actually wanted to return to. As nice as the browsing experience was, I was foiled in my attempt to set up a collection of RSS news feeds despite the option clearly marked "Web feeds." I sense a tech support call in the near future.

The latest version of the Nokia PC Suite comes in very handy. For starters, it synchs with Outlook painlessly, copying your calendar and contacts right over. It let me browse all of the music on my PC and copy over any MP3 I wanted. It offered to convert the MP3s to a more streamlined format, but when I said OK, it failed. Whatever the case, I was able to choose any MP3 as my incoming call ringtone.

Since it's a Cingular device, it uses GSM and its relevant data networks, the low bandwidth GPRS and the tolerably fast EDGE. EDGE isn't as fast as the "broadband"EVDO used by Verizon Wireless and Sprint, nor is it as fast as Cingular's own high-speed data network, but operating on a slower network has the benefit of power efficiency. In the day and a half since I last charged its battery, after plenty of e-mails and some light calling, it hasn't dropped a bar's worth of juice.

Cingular's big problem here is that it doesn't have a good plan for the converts, people who want mobile e-mail but don't have the corporate allowance to cover the high monthly fee. T-Mobile knows this: unlimited web browsing and e-mail on a BlackBerry is just $20 on top of most regular voice plans. At Cingular, unlimited data will cost you $40 a month, in addition to a $40 450-minute voice plan. That's $80 per month before all of those weird extra charges. Cingular does have a $20 SmartPhone Connect Unlimited plan for two of its Windows Mobile phones. Hey Cingular, how about offering that rate to E62 buyers? That's how to get non-corporate types to fall in love.