A sequel to Nokia E50 has been long looked forward to by lots of people. It didn’t the original E50 for too long to become a bestseller thanks to its balanced set of features, design and dimensions. Nokia E50 was the slimmest and smallest smartphone ever issued by Nokia, in fact it was the first product by that company that deserved the epithet ‘slim’ – the maximum thickness was only 15,5 at the thickest point and only 12 mm in average. The device sported a high quality of materials (stainless steel prevailed), a fair functionality for a product of that class, and, what was the essence and the key, a very affordable price. The drawbacks of the product could only make up a short list, mainly consisting in the lack of Wi-Fi and little more – although the target audience at which the device was aimed wasn’t expected to be seriously interested in the Wi-Fi functionality. As for the rest of features, the bargain proved to be far above than just satisfactory – that’s why it enjoyed so much popularity.

Nokia E51 / E50

The life cycle of Nokia E50 lasted for more than a year and a half, and now it’s time for the product to begin phasing out, giving way to its direct sequel Nokia E51. A significant number of factors prove the continuity between the two – market positioning, maximal compactness and the price bracket.

	Nokia E51 General Specifications
Telecoms:	EGSM 850/900/1800/1900, WCDMA/HSDPA 850/2100
Memory:	130 Mb of user memory, microSD card slot, up to 4 Gb supported
Data transfer protocols:	USB2.0, Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR (A2DP is supported)
Camera:	2,0 Mp (up to 1600x1200)
Display:	2.0", 240x320, 16 M Colors
Battery:	BP-6MT, 1050 мАч up to 3,48 hours of talk time up to 312 hours of standby
Dimensions:	115 x 47 x 12 mm
Estimated price:	€300

So the users of Nokia E50 got a worthy replacement following all the trends started by its predecessor. The novelty preserved all the positive aspects of the ancestor – compactness, incredibly slim build, high quality of materials, and a good deal of additional features were introduced: the much expected Wi-Fi module is now added to the pool of features, and all the weird brand-type sockets were replaced with standard ones. Nokia E51 is sure to reiterate the success of its precursor and has everything necessary for that. No competitive product could be possibly observed to appear in the foreseeable future to challenge E51 – the one and only model among the slim phones to feature a fully functional Wi-Fi module while retaining dimensions like that.

Design and ergonomics

Nokia E51 utilizes the classic candy bar form factor, a concept largely preferred among business-oriented solutions. The appearance is totally different from Nokia E50, save for a few common points. Nokia 6120 is more likely to find a lot in common with the novelty, drawbacks included. Here comes the same grease-accumulating polished surface, the steel framework along all the four sides of the casing (in E51 it’s polished and varies in color, standing for a few color variations of the product available from the stores: black, silver and bronze; the latter possesses the most impressive appearance of them all, the orientation towards a wide audience can easily be felt here, businesswomen included.

Let's compare to Nokia E50:

Let's compare to Nokia 6120 Classic:

The phone is very slim, in fact the slimmest Nokia of all the already existing models. The device gives the hand a very comfortable feel, the steel parts of the casing cast a pleasant chill. The outline of the casing loosely resembles Nokia E50, the chassis is made of plastic yet the metal battery cover and the frontal panel produce an impression of a monolith. The build quality is very high, no play between the parts or screeching – both problems are out of the question.

It’s not a secret that Nokia have been running through certain problems with a number of their models where it came to the quality of the chrome coating. Nokia N76 model has been known to suffer from that issue in a very noticeable way, the service centers were ordered to replace the parts touched by the ‘plague’ for free, which virtually stands for full casing replacement. The same nuisance has been affecting the navigation keys of Nokia E65, E61i and a number of other. The second generation of Eseries devices the problem has to be done away with, the negative experiences of previous models were taken into account, but it’s really hard to tell if E51 will show any signs of the chrome coating degradation over significant periods of time. The most likely answer would be no, though, - making the same mistake twice is something totally unacceptable in the Nokia policy.

The increased visual difference between Nseries and Eseries devices was artificially introduced to make the unpretentious and ill-informed customer clearly distinguish between the two series which, contrary to the popular belief, aren’t the same product line at all. The metal parts and spotted texture (both to become a popular trend) stand for E-series now, combined with a number of possible variations. For example, the battery cover of each of the color variations of Nokia E51 differs in texture. The cover is made from hardened steel, it’s tight and not easy to remove at all, on the other hand there’s no chance for a play between the cover and the rest of the phone to appear. The memory card expansion slot is found beneath along with the BP-6MT battery with a capacity of 1050 mAh.

The back and side surfaces are made from black matte plastic, the camera module is found enclosed into a glossy insertion, which makes it look like Nokia E50. A little bit above the speaker is seated – it’s just a sole one, yet the 3D tones option might help making it sound like a stereo system. The options are the same – sound trajectory, pitch transition interval, reverberation. The effect, however, is hard to tell from the non-boosted mode.

The lower edge comes with a miniUSB slot, a 2.5 mm headset socket and the thin charger slot. The side edges host volume controls and the dedicated button used to turn the mic off during talk and a special key that launches the voice recorder. The upper edge is notable for the profile switch button.

The light indicator flickers white at a fixed interval of time that can be customized by the user (from 5 minutes to 2 hours), it also can be turned off. At the same time, in a manner very similar to E50, four types of events can be set to act as triggers for the light indicator to respond: missed call, new incoming SMS message, MMS message or an e-mail.

Display

The display is relatively large for a smartphone, the overall dimensions counting 31x41 mm (2’’ diagonal). The size is comparable to Nokia 6300, 6500c, E50 and so on. On the whole, it causes no discomfort at all – probably the font sizes are a little bit small, but the rest is definitely all right. In fact, this is an exact replica of the screen used in the previous model, E50.

The screen is powered by the TFT technology and is capable of displaying 16M colors. The matrix sports a mirror backing, which helps to see the screen information in direct sunlight. The view angles of 6120c are large enough, the view angles are comfortable for almost any situation. The brightness is on a high level, turned to maximum it makes a match to 6300. The luminance sensor adjusts the brightness level automatically.

Controls

The phone comes with a significant number of extra control keys. The only comparable solution would be Nokia E65, but in the current case the novelty is something we’d dare call ideal in this aspect – the number of buttons stays the same while their associated functions are overhauled, resulting in a more user-friendly solution. So Nokia E51, in addition to the standard set of controls, offers a number of dedicated One Touch buttons to access the most frequently used specific applications almost instantly. They’re all placed around the navigation button, much like Nokia E65, the size and feedback are good enough not to trouble yourself with. Nokia E50 was universally reproached for low ergonomics of the exterior control elements because of the crowded positioning of the buttons and excessive amount of stray keystrokes as a result. The problem is gone by now. The whole keypad is made of black matte plastic, it feels like something more expensive than just 6120 Classic for instance.

The one touch extra controls comprise the following buttons: Calendar, Phonebook, Messages and Home Desktop. Now the menu button shares a lot of common in appearance with WM-based smartphone. Besides of a new symbol written on it, the very way the button works was changed. It’s the Home Desktop that you’ll get to after pressing the button and not the main meni any longer. The meny memory effect at last reached the Nokia phones – just like with Samsung ones, the menu keeps track of user actions and always opens the last viewed menu on each access. The symbol on the delete button was changed likewise, it’s now analogous to what we saw with Nokia E90. The most interesting thing is that every One Touch button can be reconfigured to launch custom applications, which was an option never to reach E65. Both long and short strokes on the One Touch buttons are mutually distinguishable and both can be used for different actions. So you can assign up to 6 different actions to the three extra buttons.

The navigation button is much like the rest of E-series products, sporting a chrome coating and a certain danger of degradation thereof; Nokia officials seem to be regarding this possible threat as a myth, let’s hope it will truly be a myth and none of the copies of the device will ever suffer.

The numeric keypad is quite standard, the pencil function is missing and the # key is used instead. Pressing the * key for a prolonged period of time will turn Bluetooth on and off. The keypad backlighting is pale white, it’s not too bright yet clearly visible from a distance. On the right side of the phone, right between the sound volume controls, the mic on/off button is situated – which can prove useful if you participate in mobile conferences and such like distant meetings, the left one hosts the voice recorder launch button. Quite accordingly, you can start recording a talk even without the slightest effort, you don’t have to enter any menus.

Battery

The standard BP-6MT battery sports a power capacity of 1050 mAh which is very good for such a slim device. As stated by the manufacturer, the phone can stay online for about 4.38 before the charge is wasted out, which is equal to 13 days of standby cycle. During moderate duty endurance tests (about an hour of talk time, four hours of listening to the music, an hour of working with camera, menus and other miscellaneous functions) the handset was able to withstand 3 days of autonomous operation before the battery charge faded away and the phone began crying for a good recharge. That’s quite a fair result for a product of such build and class, so we’d say no problems can be observed on this side. It’s a bit better than the same parameter of its predecessor, which stands to reason and is quite satisfactory.

	Nokia E51 Battery
Phone:	Nokia Е51	Nokia 6120 Classic
Ordinary using	3 days	2 days
Multimedia cycle, videoо (3GP)	3:30	2:50
Multimedia cycle, audio (MP3)	13:20	10:10

Data transfer protocols

The product possesses all the standard mobile networking features common for that product class, the wire data exchange is done through USB (miniUSB slot), the rest of the slots includes the 2.5 mm headset jack HS-47 and the thin charger slot.

The miniUSB slot is found at the bottom of the device, the data cable ships in the sales package as well. The data transition speed of this model is fairly comparable to Nokia 6290. The USB standard 2.0. the Mass Storage mode is supported – you can choose between Mass Storage, PC Suite Synchronization and Modem Connection. While used in the Mass Storage Mode the phone doesn’t go offline, the functionality of the device is retained at the utmost degree.

The 2.5mm to 3.5mm jack for the standard socket is known to exist in two distinct forms: the original one manufactured by Nokia themselves and the 3rd party creations. The AD-44 included into the standard sales package of Nokia 5700 is perfectly compatible with E51, the sound quality keeps at the same high level; the bundled Philips headset taken from the Nokia 5700 sales package sounds in a fashion quite comparable to that of original 5700 in terms of audio quality while plugged into the model in question using the adaptor – save for a few minor differences in the depth of field and the way how the high pitches and the basses sound.

Nokia Е51 is designed to operate in EGSM 850/900/1800/1900 networks as well as WCDMA/HSDPA 850/2100, the support for the latter being one of the product’s key features, in a manner very similar to Nokia 6120 Classic – it’ one of the most affordable smartphones with such functionality.

As stated by the manufacturer, Nokia E51 utilizes Bluetooth 2.0 + EDR, all of the general profiles are supported:

The A2DP support allows for the wireless headset to be used along with the integrated music player, no problems were spotted by us so far regarding this part of functionality.

The Bluetooth data transfer speed reaches about 130 Kb/s. The Bluetooth visibility interval is now available as a customizable setting, ranging from one minute to one hour.

One of the most significant improvement of Nokia E51 over its predecessor is the b/g Wi-Fi support, which places the product above the rest of slim phones of today market. The WLAN Wizard application helps to configure the connection in a quick an easy manner. The security protocols are WEP, WPA, WPA2. IP telephony is a technology utilizing the IP protocol for transmitting voice and data, of course in the current case the deal is all about the user opportunity to send voice calls over to compatible devices not through the GSM/3G networks but via a WiFi connection. The feature finds its foundation in the SIP protocol (Session Initiation Protocol) developed by the MMUSIC group (Multiparty Multimedia Session Control), a division of the Internet Engineering Task Force. The settings include a choice to login into VoIP either in manual mode or automatically, the default call type can be specified (cell network / web call).

Each phonebook record provides for a special info field containing the person’s SIP address. According to the SIP specifications, there are four types of SIPs:

Performance

In the field of performance lies the striking difference between the product in question and a multitude of other smartphones issued by Nloa, the standard values were a 220 Mhz CPU frequency as specified by the TI OMAP 1710 chipset. In the current case we observe a noticeable performance boost which can’t be explained by anything but the transition to the totally new hardware platform. Without dwelling deep into technical detail let’s just note out that the performance of the casual phones is in the breath of that displayed by Nokia 6120c. A number of typical operations characteristic of smartphones and casual phones alike display no difference in time taken to solve those particular tasks, which is a huge plus of the model. The hardware part of the phone almost completely coincide with that of Nokia 6120 Classic, N76 – this fact is indicated by the comparable test results as well. As compared to Nokia E50, the huge advantage in performance is easily noticeable.

	Nokia 6120 classic	Nokia E51	Nokia E50
Jbenchmark 1.0.1 Score	5797	5875	3475
Text	1650	1677	949
2D Shapes	1472	1514	885
3D Shapes	707	703	377
Fill Rate	385	372	202
Animation	1583	1609	1062
Jbenchmark 2.0.1 Score	688	638	281
Image Manipulations	405	399	240
Text	761	752	344
Sprites	566	561	341
3D Transform	366	924	542
User Interface	915	679	114
Jbenchmark 3D HQ	198	200	124
Jbenchmark 3D LQ	396	377	228
Triangles ps	59710	54703	38448
Jbenchmark HD Gaming Score	168 (5.4 fps)	161 (5.7 fps)	99 (3.3 fps)
Smooth triangles	107684	106296	59442
Fill rate, KTexels	2410	2249	1322

The phone works operates under command of the latest revision of the Symbian mobile operating system, the exact version is 9.2 / S60v3 FP1. There’s no support for Fast Boost mode, though the phone boots up quickly enough anyway – hardly more than 20 seconds is the average boot time that we witnessed.

The amount of integrated memory available to the user after the OS is loaded and ready for operation counts about 20 Mb of free space as compared to the total 64 Mb of integrated user memory. That’s not much, somewhere on a level comparable to the rest of the devices by that manufacturer. The small amount of memory imposes certain sorts of limitations, there’s no way to avoid that. On the other hand, an unpretentious consumer who buys a smartphone for the first time in their life won’t probably notice those limitations at all. Similar to the rest of devices based off the third edition of the S60 platform, the applications close on pressing the Power Off / Cancel button and are minimized with the help of the Menu button. The Heap memory size and the maximum jar size are unlimited.

The integrated memory size is 256 Mb, of which some 130 Mb are available for storing user data.

User interface

The software part mostly coincides with Nokia N95, 6110 Navigator and a multitude of Nokia products based off the S60 3rd edition FP1 platform. This also means that all of the base functionality provided with the platform is present here as well, save for a few moments that will be discussed in the article a bit later. The difference from the earlier versions is rather minor, including the OS-level support for the A2DP profile, HSDPA, the updated Nokia Web Browser, Freescale CPU support. The latter is one of the key features indicating the smooth transition to CPUs other than TI OMAP, leading to significant portfolio expansion. As it has been already mentioned, the hardware platform based off the Freescale chip is notable for lower development costs combined with a high performance, especially when it comes to the menus and standard applications like the phonebook, PIM, messaging service, camera and so on – the stereotypical image of a “slow smartphone” is waning into obscurity thanks to such products as Nokia 6290, N76, 6110 Navigator, 6120 Classic and so on. Formally these belong to the mod-end market and none of them is remarkable for an outstanding functionality or any claims for a top position in any sector – the real flagships will be TI OMAP (2420 / 2430) solutions with a hardware 2D/3D accelerator, the standard task performance will stay on the same level. This way Nokia are developing two branches of devices targeted at different market sectors: multimedia-oriented flagship models and high-performance mid-end products, expanding the presence of smartphones on the mass market.

Nokia E51 shares a common hardware base with all of the above-mentioned models, i.e. the model is based off a single-chip Freescale solution which stands for a high performance in most situations; the testing results are listed in the corresponding chapter of the article.

The arrangement of menu elements is quite typical for Nokia smartphone, almost nothing new can be observed here, except the abscence of the two new 3D profiles Horseshoe and V-shaped which are well known in other products. The menu isn’t animated, however one pleasant thing is that the right corner of every menu item no matter if the icon is a shortcut or a folder, a semi-circular mark appears if the application is currently running in the background.

The Go-To standby mode expansion first appeared among the S60-based Nokia products, the pioneers being 6680/6681. From five to eight (depending on the screen resolution and orientation) application shortcuts, schedule gist and player settings were originally the stuff that this feature allowed to pass to the screen during standby. Later the Go-To active standby mode appeared with Series40 as well, also sporting an expanded functionality – simple phones came to beat smartphones at least in one area, which looked a bit unusual.

Some of the latest devices based off S60v3 Feature Pack 1 utilizes an improved version of the go-to active standby mode allowing for some addon modules, simply speaking an opportunity to let the summary info on the currently running applications to be shown on the screen. Nokia E51 offers maximum functionality in this aspect. The same remains true for the rest of Eseries products.

The Go-To active standby mode can be switched off if the user doesn’t feel that he really needs a lot of info and shortcuts to be displayed in the standby mode. As seen in its standard implementation, the active standby mode makes a row of six shortcut icons to appear on the screen, the number of icons is unfortunately limited unlike with the Series 40 products. Also there’s an opportunity to set custom shortcuts for 3rd party applications, which is really comfortable since you no longer have to go to lots of menus one after another to launch a frequently used application like ICQ.

Nokia E51 offers certain Bluetooth device search functionality, though the application version is lower than we observed with Nokia N81. One of the Go-To options is the enhanced Search function, there were some slight changes introduced in comparison with the rest of Nokia smartphones, but on the whole the functionality remains the same. You can search anywhere ranging from Interned to your own content, messages, calendar events and alike, the application bears strong analogies with the Smart Search function widely used by Samsung.

The variety of devices based off FP1 can differ in some of the minor points like the menu elements arrangement and the order of icons, which doesn’t make a serious difference anyway since you can always customize this aspect to your liking.

Similar to the rest of S60 devices, the voice control feature doesn’t require getting used to the user’s voice in order to operate, you can use voice control without any preparation since the device adapts to your voice almost instantly, but you can also turn this adaptation off as well if the phone is used by a number of people. The voice control is activated by holding the right button pressed for a short period of time. The list of voice control settings tab includes five options (Modes, Mailbox, Bluetooth, Voice Recorder, Camera) but any other application can be added to the list as well.

The handset offers a few themes, it’s possible to choose a screensaver, the default option being a screen-size clock, but a text message or an animation could be used as well (each preinstalled theme has a unique associated screensaver. If you choose a custom animation, you must specify the playback time and backlighting duration, it stands to reason to specify the same value in both cases.

Let’s now pass to the new concept of the standby mode introduced as part of the expanded set of functions found in the new model. The Home Screen is in fact a real desktop-type object, hosting application shortcuts and a number of plugins used to tweak numerous settings, IP telephony preferences, the voice mail options, e-mail specifications and so on. Once you do your changes to a pluging’s settings, it’s minimized; also the same can be achieved manually by pressing the delete button once while working with the plugin menu. The menu button was re-christened and is now called Home Screen, every time you press it the new desktop pops up instead of the habitual main menu as it used to be. Nevertheless that’s a very handy approach to controlling your phone, and most upcoming solutions are very likely to adopt this trend as well.

Call service

The contact book is among the most powerful features of S60-based smartphones. Almost no difference can be observed on this front as compared to earlier versions. Some slight changes in the information field layout and visual effects are the only thing that makes a difference in this FP1-based firmware. The number of contact records is only limited to the amount of free user memory, which is quite typical of almost every smartphone. There are three types of fields for phone numbers, video calls, IP-phone numbers, fax numbers, e-mail address, web address, mail addresses and a single type of field for pager number, first and last name, note and date. Only one Name/Last name and Birthday record can be set per contact, but the rest of the fields can be ‘cloned’ as many times as you wish, besides i.e. you can both delete fields which appear as unnecessary and create new ones. The length limit of a field is 50 symbols. The mail address field includes seven subfields. The Symbian’s field renaming feature is quite expectedly included in the phonebook service. Not only the phone number, but as well the e-mail address, video call number, SMS, MMS and PPT contacts can be set as standard. The PhotoID service stays same with previous versions, so you might want to look for a 3rd party application since Nokia sticks to their purposely limiting this functionality. The very word ‘thumbnail’ is just enough to ascribe the deal. A contact can be associated with a VideoID clip that would play every time this person calls you over the phone. The priority is given to the VideoID should a contact have both a picture and a video associated. The ringtone will be completely replaced with the video soundtrack, which to some would appear annoying. Only .mp4 files can be used by the VideoID function.

There are three options for listing contacts:

Quite, accordingly the phonebook search can be performed not only by a single field, the search phrase length limit is 40 symbols. A dedicated tab lists the user groups, switching between the tabs is done by pressing the navigation button left and right, each of the groups can be specified a unique ringtone.

The integrated speech synthesizer can pronounce the name of the person who are calling you. First a ringtone is played once, then the name is pronounced and the ringtone follows again in an endless loop. The only thing you need to use it is to activate it. The same synthesizer is used for voice dialing - so you don’t have to leave voice marks, only the contact name needs to be spoken out for the dialing to start. The accuracy of recognition is rather high, in most cases it works without any need to repeat things twice. However in a very noisy environment you might happen to be forced to. There’s nothing much special about the quick dialing option.

The call logs are organized just as in the previous versions: Incoming, Dialed and Missed calls are displayed on the three respective lists, no uniform list comprising the three kinds is available, unfortunately. Switching between the lists is done by pressing the navigation button sideways. The maximum period of time for which call information can be stored is one month, which can be further customized to ten or one day. A number of filters can be applied to the call log, each call event can be viewed separately with all the detailed information.

Messaging

The phone supports SMS, MMS and E-mail functionality. Nothing really remarkable is seen on this front: just the usual set of functions necessary for everyone like templates, t9, drafts, saving messages to the memory card (supported both for SMS and MMS). The text input is done in the quite traditional manner, switching between languages is done in the context menu, the # serves for the rest of the functions of the missing Edit button – caps lock, num lock, copy and paste.

Switching between received, sent and other kinds of messages is done by pressing the joystick or the navigation button sideways, it’s quite comfortable and eliminates the necessity to get back to the messages menu every time now and again, the tabs representing each category of messages are shown in a row at the top of the screen. Messages can be sorted by date, sender, subject and the type of the message itself. You can move messages between folders and create an unlimited number of custom folder inside the My Folder directory.

The delivery notes are stored separately, they can be discarded both one by one or by the whole stock. The user can specify if they want the delivery notes to be sent both for MMS and SMS messages or any one of the two kinds.

The MMS service is comfortable, the maximum message size is limited to 300 Kb, an image, an audio clip (talk record) and a video clip can be attached to the message. MMS options include the image size setting - original, small and large. The message text can either precede or follow the multimedia content. The address field isn’t just limited to a single line of text, it also optionally contains the Subject or Carbon Copy fields.

Upon creating an MMS message the context menu offers to compose a slide show. Should the user agree, a total of four templates are displayed - Image (image slides), Video (video snapshot slides, Thumbnails (pairs of two), and Headers (each slide is shown with a text header). The templates are easy to handle, allowing for creation of impressive animated messages.

The e-mail client supports the SMTP/POP3/IMAP4 protocols. Upon creating a new mailbox a special wizard is launched, automating the process to the point where it becomes totally easy even for an inexperienced user. Some of the fields are filled autmatically, tips are displayed during each step, the only thing that is directly required from the user is to specify the mailbox and server type.

Scheduled e-mail checks are supported, three modes for downloading mail to the smartphone are available: headers only, full messages or full messages with attachments. The volume of downloaded information can also be limited to a specified number of incoming messages, or alternatively, all of them can be downloaded upon every e-mail check.

Voice messaging is supported: the text field is substituted with a large icon, the activation of which will bring up the voice recorder interface and the recording begins immediately. After recording the message, the maximum length of which is limited to two and a half minutes, the icon changes its looks. If you want to record the message again, you can delete the previously recorded one from the message by pressing the C button.

The incoming messages can be read aloud by the integrated speech synthesizer. The implementation isn’t too good, it’s inferior in quality as compared to Nokia 5500 sport, the controls are somewhat awkward. The speech volume is adjustable, ranging from 1 to 10. The only preinstalled voice is Ellen, an AI English speaker, surprisingly no other languages are supported. Also there’s no way to specify a folder for the system to read messages from, in other words the phone only recognizes the Incoming folder but won’t let to choose the e-mail folder which otherwise would be great. Unfortunately, copying e-mail messages to the Incoming folder doesn’t improve the situation – the application only recognizes text messages. But the biggest minus is the lack of an automatic or quick launch option for the speech synthesizer, in other words you have to go though a few menus every time you want to use that functionality. So with the N81 handset it’s easier to read a message than listen to it.

PIM

The personal information manager comprises a number of applications including: Measures and Currencies Converter, Notes, Voice Recorder and Calculator. The converter and calculator are quite standard applications found on many phones based off the same platform: the convertor acts in full accordance with its name, converting a selected currency or measure into another kind, the calculator is very primitive and only supports the very basic arithmetic.

The alarm clock has quite a number of settings as compared to what we had with pre-FP1 devices. Besides a one-time signal, the alarm clock supports a schedule on a weekday basis, the signals can be one-time and recurring, it’s possible to set a signal to be played once a week or daily, on a specified weekday only, on workdays or on weekends. Although the application doesn’t allow to configure a signal to be played on a manually selected number of days, limiting the user to the options listed above. There’s an option to set any weekday save for Sunday as a workday. Any custom ringtone can be used for an alarm clock signal.

The calendar supports four viewing modes: by month, week or day (hour-based schedule is available in this case), or as a task list featuring completion deadlines. Stats on the number of completed and unfinished tasks can be displayed on the screen during standby. Customizable default values include the calendar signal, the starting weekday and the default viewing mode.

Four types of events can be associated with a particular date: meeting, reminder, anniversary or task. Upon adding a new event, the user is asked to specify the place/subject, start and end time and/or date, alarm signal, repeating signal, synchronization type (personal / shared), everything looks very simple yet efficient. Once an event is specified, a colored corner is added to the date record which displays a pop-up with detailed description if you hover the cursor over it; if you jump to a specified date, a full schedule for that date is shown. Upon adding a new event, a reminder signal can be set to play daily, weekly, once in a fortnight, etc. Also you are prompted to specify an expiration date for the signal – once the day comes, the reminder deactivates itself. The calendar functionality of the model should be highly praised, judging by our experience.

The office applications are in essence the classical QuickOffice for viewing Microsoft Office files: Word(*.doc), Excel (*.xls), PowerPoint(*.ptt). A number of Office versions are supported Office (97, 2000, and XP) though the compatibility doesn’t embrace all the existing versions. The document editing functionality doesn’t depend on the S60 FP1 platform, that’s why you have to install a full version of QuickOffice to be able to edit such documents.

An enhanced suppot for user groups is one of the most significant improvements, a separate Groups manager application is now available to the user which allows for an easier control over contact management - this part of the device's functionality is way more advanced than similar features in other phones. THe user can Create, Delete, Edit or perform five types of Actions: Call, New Message, Group Web Page, PIT, teleconference. The further logics hiding between this idea is pretty clear: the Call is used for making successive calls the group member in order to connect all of them into a common pool of teleconference participants (the maximum number of participants is limited by the technical specifications of the local mobile network), the New Message serves as a mass mailer delivering messages to all the members of the group (a single SMS to all to all them simultanously, for instance), the Group Web Page selects the shortcut to the group's dedicated web page from the Bookmarks menu.

Similar to Nokia E90, this phone supports the Active Notes application, which is a further step on the way of making the interaction between human and machine not only more efficient, but also more comfortable and natural. It's a serious business application after all, a certain part of the audience won't take much interest in in, but the oppurtunities granted by it definitely shouldn't be neglected in this review. So, the Notes found in many a device before were no more than text files with the set of options limited to Print and Send, while Active Notes allows for almost any type of multimedia object to be inserted into a note's body: images, audio and video files, you clients' and partners' biz cards and what not - the output data is wrapped into a HTML file. Such an expanded can be viewed with a web browser or sent by SMS (in this case only the text part of the Note is sent), MMS, Bluetooth or the IrDA. The Notes Manager lets you move them from the SIM card memory to the phone memory and back again, move them between folders, create custom folders. A note can be associated with a record from your phonebook or even a group of contatcs (only one Note can be associated, if you further try this to another Note you'll be prompted to specify another contact record(s) to associate it with since the selected one is already 'occupied'. The corresponding menu item in the application settings menu lets you choose the type of storage used, the view mode (list or icons), note display status during a call (once you activate the Note icon, a special symbol pops up nearby, showing that it's associated with a particular contact).

The voice recorder is quite a traditional application common to all Nokia products, it’s very simple, the maximum length of a record equals to one hour, the only option is to choose the record file storage location – selectable from the user memory and the memory expansion card). The record quality is high, no possible trouble here. You can record your phone talks, the dedicated button used for launching the voice recorder is found on the left edge of the phone.

Nokia Web Browser

One of the main changes in Feature Pack 1 is the improved web browser. The browser went through a significant update - the famed Konqueror project has been put in the foundation of the application, also used as the software component stock for Apple’s Safari Web Browser. Nokia Web Browser involves a most useful functionality providing for comortable Web surfing: HTML 4.01 (full support for tabs, frames and forms), JavaScript 1.5, CSS1 and CSS2, RSS. The browser interface is translated into 46 languages, though not every language is supported by a specific version of the device. The number of supported languages is hardcoded in the phone’s firmware depending on the region of sale.

The following graphics formats are supported: GIF, JPEG, BMP, WBMP, PNG. Supported audio formats include: MIDI, WAV, MP3, ACC, EACC+, AMR-NB, AMR-WB, Real Audio. The browser supports security protocols and algorithms that come with the S60 platform and Symbian OS.

Web pages can be navigated through with help of a minimap, a red frame indicating the area which will be shown on the screen after switching back to the standard view. No lags or performance drops was observed during the tests, however it takes a couple of seconds for the minimap to appear due to the associated visual effect. Minimap can also be customized to act as an overlay during scrolling times, shown just abova the main image. In this case the minimap is rendered semi-transparent, letting the user learn of his current location on the page.

The History log enjoys a stylish implementation, the earlier visited pages all are given tiny previews, each preview window comes with a header to make recognition as easy as it comes.

The bookmark service is well designed and it’s just what you need for comfortable work. Two types of bookmarks are available: common and adaptive. Common bookmarks are created by the user in a way similar to bookmarking web pages in PC browsers like Internet Explorer or Opera. Adaptive bookmarks are created automatically depending on the relevance of the recently visited pages, structurized in a way that lets the user to see them sorted in groups each comprising pages from the same site. An adaptive bookmark can be converted into a common one. Both types can be sent as links via SMS.

The menu navigation system is well-planed, the numeric keys are also used as shortcuts to different browser functions.

The main browser changes introduced with the Feature Pack 1 as compared to its previous version are:

The listed changes are rather important, the browser has undergone some really positive changes, we can only hope for further improvements like adding copy/paste functionality or an option to choose between opening a link in the same or in a new tab. Even without those, the browser is one of the best available on the mobile market, giving the S60 some real PC feel.

Camera

Nokia E51 comes with an inexpensive 2 Mp camera module – you can’t expect much from it, let alone macro and auto focusing modes. The camera is fully analogous to the one utilized in Nokia 6290, for instance. In well-lit environments, - and this mostly means outdoors, - you can expect average image quality, the LED flashlight may be of some help in poorly lit scenes. The focal distance of the camera ranges from 10 cm to infinity, anything closer than 10 cm will produce a blurry image.

The camera interface utilizes the portrait orientation, the viewfinder is rather small. A small row of shortcut icons is shown in the camera mode, is used to manipulate various options and settings right in the process of shooting, but if you don’t like it you can hide it by checking the corresponding option. An analogous panel is found with the N73 and N95 models, it’s in fact rather helpful so the camera interface might even be better than the camera itself. With the updated version of the interface it's also possible to turn on the viewfinder grid, which sometimes proves quite helpful.

The settings include:

All in all, the number of settings is minimal, the camera being only a complementary feature – most likely it was included out of the commonly accepted idea that any modern cell phone should have a camera. This type of camera module is common to all the non-imaging Nokia phones of the mid-end market segment.

The video clips are recorded at a maximum resolution of 320x240 (QVGA) with a framerate of 15 frames per second. The file format is MPEG4. The quality of the videos is somewhere a bit below average, it looks quite viewable on the phone screen, but you’d for sure be disappointed if you tried to watch them on a PC screen.

Following the open standards ideology, the company only supports the open multimedia formats in their products, namely 3GP and MPEG-4, there’s no support for AVI so you have to install a third-party codec on order to be able to play that type of files (e.g. DivX Player). The optimal screen resolution for viewing video clips is 320x240.

As far as the image quality is concerned, to put it frankly it’s rather plain. Maybe the high quality of the screen (that makes images look a bit better, in a way) would fool you into thinking that the photos are quite OK, but on a larger screen like a TV or PC monitor you’d see a lot of noise and artifacts, save probably only for shots taken in full daylight which might look OK in some cases.

The gallery is as simple as it comes, it can hardly be compared to the gallery application that comes with multimedia-oriented smartphones by Nokia, the options only include sorting by date, name, size and file format. Gallery Search function is available – it’ great they decided to keep it in since it becomes really handy when you’ve got lots of images in your gallery. There’s no function to make up and launch a slide show.

Multimedia

The user interface of the player seems to have gone through some really massive changes and doesn’t look like anything seen before – a similar design can only be observed with the hottest and latest offerings based off the updated third revision of S60 Feature Pack 1 (like Nokia N95, 6290), the big difference only concludes in the arrangement of screen elements. The controls are rather comfortable, the play/rewind/pause functions are activated with the moves of the navigation button, the respective indicator symbols are displayed every time you engage one of those functions. The name of the song and performer are shown on the screen during standby, the sound volume can be controlled with the help of the side buttons.

The player settings include five equalizer presets with the opportunity of creating an unlimited number of user profiles. Also there are settings allowing to tweak balance, enhanced stereo sound, bass boost, reverberation. Different miscellaneous options are available: sorting by performer, album, genre and so on, as well as auto repeat and play random. The Album Arts feature is present, meaning that you can associate an album cover artwork with the selected tracks. There’s no visualization mode, the settings are rather few, on the other hand the product isn’t marketed as a musical solution. And for a non-musical phone the sound quality and player ergonomics are on a comparatively good level. The headset is plugged with a 2,5 mm jack which is found at the bottom edge of the phone, which is very comfortable for carrying it in the pocket. The adaptor and the remote control piece taken from the Nokia 5700 sales package are compatible with this model as well, upon plugging the headset the device doesn’t ask to specify the accessory type manually unlike Nokia N76 or N95, the type of connected device is recognized automatically.

The following media formats are supported: AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, MP3, MP4, M4A, (SP-)MIDI, AMR, WMA, RealAudio 7,8,10, True tones, WAV, Mobile XMF, which is completely sufficient for the majority of consumers.

MP3	+
WMA	+
Polyphonic	+, 64 tones
XMF	+
AMR (Voice Tag)	+
AAC	+
AAC+	+
e-AAC+	+
i-Melody	-
SMAF	-
Midi (SMF)	+
SP-Midi	+
RealAudio 7,8,10	+
True tones	+
WAV	+
RA	-

There’s nothing very remarkable about the FM tuner, up to 50 favorite frequencies can be bookmarked unlike the 20 value of the earlier models, visualization service support also belongs here. You have to plug the headset in order to use the tuner, since the former acts as an antennae. The radio module sports a good sensitivity, the sound quality also arouses no questions. The presence of an FM tuner is rather peculiar for this class of products, it’s the second specimen from Eseries that comes with an integrated FM tuner.

During playback mode, the device survived about 13 hours of continuous multimedia cycle – a result quite worthy of a Symbian smartphone. The quality of sound is roughly on the same level with Nokia 6120 Classic, there’s no use comparing it to any dedicated music solution – the player isn’t on the priority list for this phone, but for a business-oriented product Nokia E51 has a very decent sound. It’s a huge improvement over the now outdated Nokia E50.

SMAPE’s opinion

The quality of communications provided by the device is in full keeping with the latest standards in the field of mobile technology, no problem arouses on this front. The sound volume of the polyphonic speaker is high, yet on some occasions it can accidentally get muffled.

As we have already noted out for a number of times, Nokia E51 is the direct successor of the ‘ideology’ that was put into the foundation of the Nokia E50 concept. That very device was the most compact smartphone of those days, hence its high popularity. The balance between the set of features and the price played a major part in its way to the bestseller status as well. A similar fate is looming over its successor, Nokia N51. Today’s most compact and slimmest smartphone available on the market, it now enjoys full Wi-Fi support, sports a full set of telecom features that are seen as necessary for a modern smartphone, a high quality of build and materials. The positioning is virtually the same with Nokia E50. The whole combination stands for the brightest forecast possible – the product is doomed to become another bestseller. Its high demand in the nearest future is out of question. The only drawback is the price, it will be as much as 300 euro on the release day. On the other hand, considering the uniqueness of the product, its class and the actual functionality you are offered for that price, it’s fully justified. The same sum of money, or even more, is the price of a Nokia 6500 Classic, which hardly matches the N51 in terms of functionality – it’s just some 2,5 mm thinner and offers no other advantages. The aesthetical impact delivered by the design of Nokia E51 is significant enough to leave nobody untouched: a number of genuine designer solutions are put into practice, the texturized metal of the back surface and the polished stainless steel of the framing were never seen before in such a successful combination, a number of color variations are available (the bronze one looking the most original of them all). So as a result we get a stylish and a highly ergonomic solution displaying unmatched results in the competition with the rest of slim handsets.

Switching to Nokia E51 from the good old E50 is more than justified; in our subjective opinion the E51 might look slightly bigger and narrower though – the E50 was narrower and the visual effect was augmented by the framing. But in fact this difference can hardly be felt, the device still sits in the hand quite naturally, and the reduced thickness makes it more pocket-friendly. But the most weighty factor speaking in favor of E51 is the ergonomics; the E50 was a bit challenged on this front (you might remember the too tight joystick button and the crowded control buttons) while the novelty hardly displays any signs of trouble in this sphere.

We’d like to underline it once more that Nokia E51 is a solution truly unique to its market segment. There aren’t any models by Nokia or other manufacturers that could display a similar balance between price and feats, neither its slimness and compactness are matched by anything available from the shop shelf so far. Being the cup winner in the ergonomics and functionality categories, the E51 would make a fine buy if you don’t mind its price. The sum you’re asked for is so far the only misbalance of the novelty, its price starting from 300 euro – probably it would be better to wait and see how the price declines until it reaches a stable value. Once it gets to about 260 euro, its popularity will skyrocket to a level comparable to its great ancestor, Nokia E50.

+ Stylish design, very compact dimensions
+ Extra control buttons and high ergonomics
+ High quality of material and build quality
+ High performance
+ Advanced telecommunication capabilities
- Grease-loving casing
- Small size of the screen

Author: Iliya Solovyev, editor@smape.com

SMAPE.com

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