Nokia E51- Review

Nokia introduced the Nokia E51 last fall in European markets and now you can buy the phone from online importers and even big name stores like Staples (might be online only) in the US. Though running on the same OS and platform (Symbian 9 and S60), Nokia makes distinctions between the Nokia Nseries and the Nokia Eseries: the Nseries focuses on multimedia while the Eseries aims to provide enterprise solutions. The Nokia E51 is one of the smaller phones in the series that includes giants like the communicator and the . The Nokia E51 is a quad band GSM phone that has Euro 3G and EDGE in the US. It comes with a 2 megapixel camera, supports most corporate email, has WiFi and Bluetooth, an FM radio, microSD card slot and a host of nifty applications that are part of Symbian S60 3rd Edition feature pack 1 OS including an excellent web browser. The Nokia also comes with a suite of applications for business users to view MS Office files and PDF files.

For US mobile users who buy non-carrier GSM phones, it’s always a comforting factor and sometimes a purchasing factor to have an US warranty. And if you purchase a Nokia E51 from authorized dealers, you will get a one-year warranty, US power charger, US English language selection on the phone and English manual. The Nokia E51 currently comes in three colors: White Steel, black and Rose Steel.

Design and Ergonomics

The Nokia E51 has a candy bar design, a staple of European style phones. There is no mistaking the E51’s good build quality, and the stainless steel frame and back cover add class and style. And even in a softer Rose Steel color, the Nokia E51 shows an underlying masculinity. Unlike many Eseries phones that offer a QWERTY keyboard, the E51 has just a simple number keypad. The number keys are large but flat, easy to dial but not hugely easy for blind dialing and typing. The 5-way directional pad is rectangular with a large center key and a relatively thin navigation key ring surrounding the center key. Four dedicated application launch keys flank the d-pad and call send, call end and two shoulder keys surround the application launch keys. The call control buttons are large enough to use but need precision presses, but the shoulder keys are just too thin for ease of use.

To avoid accidental side button presses, the Nokia E51’s side buttons (volume buttons, voice command and mute keys) and the top power button are covered with rubber. This design effectively prevents accidental key presses but makes it harder to quickly change volume during a call or easily launch voice command as the keys are a bit too stiff to push. The 2 megapixel camera lives on the back of the phone above the battery door. Though you will need to open the battery door to access the microSD card, you don’t need to take the battery out (or shut down the phone) to use the slot. The SIM card slot however requires removal of the battery to access and small tweezers to get the card out.

Phone Features and Reception

Most Nokia phones have very good call quality and the Nokia E51 is no exception. Voice on both incoming and outgoing ends is clear and has very loud volume, and the built-in speakerphone is also exceptionally loud. The E51 gets a very strong signal and has never dropped a phone call on AT&T or T-Mobile. The Nokia E51 can make Internet calls via Cisco VoIP (you can download the app) if you have the infrastructure and the phone also has dual mode transfer multi-slot class 11 which means you can make a voice call and access data at the same time. The Nokia E51 supports all common call management features and comes with voice command software for voice dialing, launching applications and wireless radios and more. There is a dedicated side launch button for voice command and you don’t need to pre-record voice tags. The voice command worked 80% of the time in our tests (pretty good for S60 voice command which isn’t the best), and you must position the phone close to your mouth for better recognition results.

On paper the Nokia E51 is hobbled by the fact that it only has 3G on the 850/2100 MHz bands (currently AT&T offers 3G mostly on the 1900 MHz band), but in reality the S60 browser is so fast at rendering web pages that it makes up some ground. Rich content HTML sites take just a few seconds longer than 3G phones such as the Nokia N95-US 8GB. Our dslreports test results showed 127-180 kbit/sec but the page loading speed seemed faster than these numbers.

The E51 offers Wi-Fi for home, office and Wi-Fi hotspots to make up for the slow EDGE speed. The Safari-based web browser gives you excellent web page rendering, fast page loading and support for Javascript, CSS and even dHTML. It has a page overview mode where you can choose a section of the page you want to zoom in on and a virtual cursor to move around the page so you need not move from link to link to get to the bottom of a page.

For messaging, the Nokia E51 supports SMS, MMS (300kb max per file) and IM (Yahoo, AOL, MSN, OMA 1.2), but the wide variety of email support is where the Nokia Eseries shines. The Nokia supports not only the SMTP, IMAP4 and POP3 protocols but also works with Mail for Exchange, BlackBerry Connect, Visto Mobile and Seven Always-on. Since the E51 targets users who have access to corporate email with business content, the E51’s Email application supports attachments and viewing MS Word, PowerPoint, Excel and PDF files.

Display and Multimedia

The Nokia E51 has a QVGA 2” active-matrix display that supports up to 16 million colors. The screen looks bright and color saturated, and it supports landscape mode in applications such image gallery and the web browser, which comes in handy. Photos look sharp and colorful on Nokia’s screen and web pages also look great.

If you compare the multimedia features, the Nokia Nseries phones win hands down, but the Eseries stays competitive in the multimedia department with other smartphones and high-end phones. The E51 comes with RealPlayer for video playback, Music Player for your MP3 pleasure and an FM radio that uses the included 2.5mm wired headset as its antenna. The phone has 130 MB of internal memory and has a microSD card slot that supports high capacity cards to store video and music files (and any other type of file you wish). The music player can play MP3 files, AAC and WMA files. So if you’ve ripped music with iTunes or Windows Media Player you can play these on the Nokia. The audio quality for music playback is decent but not exceptional via the phone’s speaker and the included wired stereo headset. The sound is a bit thin and slightly muffled over the wired headset, but volume is loud. The E51 also has support for A2DP via Bluetooth and you can listen to music through a Bluetooth stereo headset. We tested the Nokia with several Bluetooth stereo headsets including the excellent , and the sound quality was good but not inspiringly full like many Nseries phones and some recent feature phones. To listen to the radio, you will need to connect the included headset to the E51 as the headset has the radio antenna. The FM radio application can download your local radio stations with call letter (RDS) and visual radio service IDs. The radio has very good quality in metro areas and gets lots of FM stations.