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The opulence doesn't stop at physical design, though. The E66 is packed with sensible and clever features that we've come to love Nokia handsets for over the years. Embedded inside is an accelerometer, much like the iPhone and HTC Touch Diamond, used for flipping the screen from horizontal to vertical as you rotate the phone in your hand. This is especially useful when browsing web pages, but an even more handy application of the hardware is its ingenious hang-up feature. When the phone rings, if you don't want to answer, simply flip the handset over and it'll silence it for you.

The list of core phone hardware proves the E66 is no slouch either. Webpages load up swiftly thanks to HSDPA support plus there's Wi-Fi connectivity, Bluetooth 2.0, a 3.2-megapixel camera and front-facing VGA video call lens, an FM radio, and the inevitable GPS receiver. The latter is accompanied on this handset by Nokia's own Maps 2.0 application. This picked up my location in central London very quickly, and though it offers turn-by-turn navigation, don't get too excited over it - it's a subscription-based extra, and not that cheap either. Prices start at £7 per month, £20 for three months or £55 per year.

The numerical keypad design means that this isn't a phone you're going to want to use to type out long emails and documents on, but it doesn't mean you don't need to keep on top of things. And to this end, the E66 ships with an impressive list of preinstalled email clients. Support for POP3 and IMAP clients works brilliantly - just pop your Gmail details into the wizard and you'll be ready to rock and roll in seconds. A nice touch is that the Nokia client defaults to IMAP rather than POP3. For the first time, Nokia's excellent Microsoft Exchange client is preinstalled, and this allows - after a bit of fiddling with settings - for push email to be setup, complete with calendar, contacts and to-do list synchronisation over the air. Much better than having to plug in and sync with wires using Nokia's PC Suite application.

And that's not all. Click on the download folder and you'll find several other messaging options, ready to be installed, from Windows Live Messenger and Hotmail to Yahoo! Go. There's no sign of a Blackberry client, though, which is a disappointment.

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