Nokia's E series of smartphones is aimed pretty squarely at the business community, but in fact it has a lot to offer the well organised consumer too.
The E51 is possibly the most attractive of the bunch to date, because it is a small, lightweight, candybar style mobile phone, housing some sophisticated software. It looks quite innocuous, but it packs a real punch.
In fact the main outward sign that this is a ‘power' phone is the bank of buttons sitting immediately beneath the screen. This includes the usual Call, End and Nokia soft-keys, but also houses what Nokia calls its ‘One-touch' keys; four buttons designed to give you access to Contacts, Calendar, mobile e-mail and application management functions.
These keys all have three functions. For example, press the Calendar key and the calendar opens for you to view appointments. Hold it down and you are taken to the screen where you can create a new meeting. Tap the key twice and you see your calendar on the first press, returning to the previous application on the second.
To make room for all these keys, and for a generously sized number pad, the screen is quite small at just two inches corner to corner. It has a fairly standard 240 x 320 pixel resolution, and it is sharp and clear.
This is a 3G handset with HSDPA support for fast data downloading, but no front-facing camera for two-way video calling. You can make video calls, but you have to use the back-facing 2-megapixel camera, so can only show the caller what you can see rather than your own face. Some might think that a blessing!
As a high end phone it is perhaps no surprise that Wi-Fi is built in, and one of the markets Nokia has in mind for this phone is the business place where workers move around a lot and can use Voice-over-IP telephone systems to ensure staff are contactable at all times.
There is 130MB of built-in memory and a microSD card slot to add more. A huge array of applications is built in, including the expected calendar and To Do management, mobile e-mail and readers for PDF, Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint. Nokia Maps is built in for navigation purposes, though there's no GPS so you'll need to add a Bluetooth one if you want door to door navigation - and pay for that as an add-on to Nokia Maps, too.
Nokia's Active Notes application lets you embed images, sounds, Web addresses and more into text notes, and in addition to the music player there is an FM radio.
