In the span of about a year, Nokia launched a bewildering array of unlocked smartphones. While their N-series focuses on entertainment, the midrange business-class E series is all about communication and has fewer media frills. The company's new E65 ($449 list), resembles an updated T-Mobile SDA with its EDGE and Wi-Fi support—and no QWERTY keyboard. But the E65 one-ups the SDA by sporting a classy slider mechanism, slightly smaller design, higher-quality materials and faster performance.

The 4.1-ounce E65's design employs multiple textures. A plastic trim encases an aluminum faceplate, while a soft-touch rear battery cover evokes the feel of a leather wallet. It's a classy look. The E65's slider mechanism is pleasing, too, and has a solid response and positive engagement. It's easy to dial numbers on the roomy numeric keypad, and there's a sharp, bright 320-by-240 portrait screen with small, crisp fonts. At 0.6 inches thick, you won't mistake it for Nokia's slim 6300, but the E65 is thin and well-balanced for a slider.

Nokia packed the handset with handy hardware buttons—some of which are sadly too small—including one-touch keys for conference calls, volume up and down, contacts, and a Mute toggle switch. The N95's well-designed control pad is reprised here in slightly squished form, with a five-way control pad, two assignable soft keys, a My Own key, and a separate power button along the top edge.

The E65 is a quad-band world phone that supports WCDMA 2100 overseas, built-in Wi-Fi wireless networking, and Bluetooth 1.2 hands-free connectivity. Unfortunately, the E65 supports only EDGE here, not the faster 3G HSDPA protocol. Data speed suffers as a result, but not as much as you'd expect. The E65's S60 browser scored a stellar 275 kilobits per second over EDGE using an AT&T SIM card. In practice, the E65 felt about as fast rendering Web pages at EDGE speed as my benchmark Motorola Q does at EV-DO speeds with Internet Explorer Mobile; for faster speeds, you can always snag a free Wi-Fi connection.

A variety of voice calls sounded clear in both directions using a T-Mobile SIM card. One call, though, had a series of dropouts that could have been network-related. Subsequent calls to that number connected just fine. The E65 sounded great when paired with a SoundID SM100 Bluetooth headset. The built-in speakerphone was surprisingly clear and didn't grate on the ear, but, unfortunately, the volume was too low for outdoor use.

The phone's 2-megapixel camera takes detailed, grayish photos with good light balance but could do with a healthy shot of color. This is one fast camera, even considering the two-second file-save delay after each shot. Shutter delay is almost imperceptible. There's no flash, but those are usually useless anyway. The E65 records 15 frame-per-second video at 352-by-288 pixel resolution, a small cut above the usual thumbnail-size recordings. The music player app had no trouble with MP3 tracks, either, but couldn't play unprotected iTunes plus AAC files. The mono speaker that sounded fine on voice calls proved horrendous with music. I wouldn't even bother using it. The E65 can also play RealPlayer and Flash files and has a voice-recorder app.

The E65 runs the Symbian S60 3rd edition operating system and allocates 50MB of internal memory for contacts, messages, and third-party applications. There's also a microSD slot hidden under the battery cover. The built-in mail client works with POP/IMAP, SMTP, and IMAP4 accounts. Unfortunately, there's no way to edit Office documents out of the box. The $49 Quickoffice Premier supports the E65, but DataViz still doesn't make Documents To Go for the S60 platform.

Nokia rates the E65 at up to 6 hours of talk time on GSM networks using its included 1000 mAh Extended Li-Ion Battery. It lasted 7 hours 44 minutes on a rundown test using the same T-Mobile SIM card, an average but not spectacular showing.

So if the E65 is a solid phone but lacks the Nokia 6300's U.S. 3G network support, slimmer profile, and lower price, why not just get the 6300? Simply put, the E65 is a smartphone, whereas the 6300 is just a feature phone that runs the lower-end Symbian S40 OS. Mind you, the 6300 is a great handset if you don't need a smartphone. But if you're looking for an alternative to the now-standard-issue BlackBerry Pearl, the slider E65 is worth a look. It combines a powerful smartphone OS, solid call quality, and top-end features in a small, classy form factor.

Compare the Nokia E65 with several other mobile phones side by side.