(To get the most out of this article, please watch the video above and then read the text below. If you have any comments or questions, please click on the comments link at the end.)
Nokia E51
What's it like in real life?
The E51 is small, tough and sturdy. The frame around the keypad and screen is steel and available in various metallic colours (though the phone we were loaned was black so you can't see the metal easily in the video). The battery cover is also steel, and different colour schemes seem to have different patterns etched into the back of the cover. The etching makes the phone very easy to grip.
There's a very bright white LED in the top corner of the phone which can be set to blink for various events, for example if you have unread text messages or e-mail.
There are various buttons around the edge of the phone such as volume controls, the power button etc. These are all coated in rubber, which makes them very well protected but also extremely difficult to press.
The keypad is both nice and not-so-nice. The buttons are easy to press and click satisfyingly, but the sheer number of buttons (including dedicated extra ones for calendar, address book and e-mail) can make the pad difficult to use, and the smallness of the phone makes things worse. On the other hand, the dedicated buttons do save a lot of time if you use these particular functions frequently.
The screen is QVGA (240x320 pixels), the same resolution as most other current Nokia smartphones, but at 2 inches in size it's physically smaller than you may expect.
How is it as a phone?
Calls worked fine, no problems at all. Sound quality was fine, and the phone supports all the usual extra options such as speakerphone or Bluetooth headset.
Texting was okay, but the crowded keypad made things trickier than they should be. For example I kept pressing the e-mail button by accident. Texts and E-mails are handled by the usual Messaging application familiar to S60 phone users.
What about the interface?
The E51 uses the Symbian S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 1 platform, which looks very similar to S60 3rd Edition but has a number of enhancements such as the ability to create your own folders and sub-folders, and the blue circles next to icons which warn you about still-active applications.
The default menu arrangement has an Office folder full of business-oriented applications including Active Notes (like a souped-up version of Notes) and the usual Quickoffice viewer and editor. Otherwise though, the menu structure is a bit of a mess and it's quite difficult to find things.
One particularly confusing thing was when I tried to install Nokia Maps using the Download! service. It did indeed download and install the application, but it didn't put it in the Applications folder that I was expecting, and it took some effort to find out where the heck it had ended up. There was nothing to indicate where it would be installed, either.
As with almost all S60 devices, the E51 supports themes and comes with several built-in. You can install lots more from sites such as mobile9.com, and they can change the wallpaper, icons, dialogue boxes, clock and other visual elements.
Software
The E51 is compatible with Symbian S60 3rd Edition (aka S60v3) games and applications, and also Java J2ME and Flash Lite 2.0. These can be installed straight onto the phone through the web browser, or downloaded onto your PC and then installed on the phone using the Nokia PC Suite application and a USB cable.
There's also a built-in Download! icon which contains a small selection of S60 and Java apps and games. These can be bought and downloaded directly onto the phone, either over the phone network or through Wi-Fi.
The E51 can open many major file types including Microsoft Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF and Zip files.
Music, Video and Other Multimedia
The E51 has the usual built-in music and video players, which can cope with lots of audio formats (AAC, eAAC+, MP3, WMA, M4A, RealAudio, MIDI etc) and several video formats (MP4, RealVideo, 3GPP).
One thing I'd strongly recommend is to install the Nokia Podcasting application, which lets you search for podcasts from a online database or look them up in a separate directory. If you find a podcast that interests you, you can add it to your subscriptions and download an episode or two. The app can be set to download podcasts automatically whenever you want, so for example it could download podcasts at night and provide a phone full of stuff to listen to in the morning. This is an excellent feature if you have to commute regularly, podcasts really fill in time very nicely indeed.
There's a microSDHC memory card slot which is hotswap (i.e. you can change cards without switching the phone off), but you do have to take the back cover off to access it. The back cover slides off easily though so this isn't a huge problem. Offically the slot only supports microSD and microSDHC cards up to 4 gigabytes, but unofficially you may be able to use much higher capacity cards. 4 gigabytes is enough for roughly 1000 to 1500 tracks, depending on track length and sound quality.
The phone only has a 2.5mm audio socket so if you want to use a pair of 3.5mm headphones you will need to buy an adaptor. Alternatively, you can use wireless Bluetooth stereo headphones with the E51 thanks to its compatibility with the A2DP and AVRCP Bluetooth profiles. The sound quality on all kinds of headphones is okay but nothing special.
The external speaker sounded somehow broken, with a decent enough sound but the occasional distortion coming through on certain notes.
There's an FM radio which (as with all phone radios) requires headphones to be plugged to act as an aerial. The radio supports Visual Radio and station preset downloads. The preset download service is especially useful, it lets you fill in all the station names for wherever you are in the world by selecting a location from an online databse.
There's a dedicated voice recorder button on the left of the phone, which lets you use the E51 as a dictaphone for taking brief audio notes.
Camera and Camcorder
The E51 has a 2 megapixel camera which can also be used for shooting video at QVGA resolution (320x240 pixels) at 15 frames per second.
Here are some sample photos:
The Web & E-Mail
The E51 has S60's own built-in web browser which is based on the same open source WebKit core as Apple's Safari (which is used on the iPhone and Macintosh). The interface on top of the rendering engine is different though, and Nokia has added Flash support so you can view sites such as homestarrunner.com using the S60 browser.
The QVGA screen is too low resolution to display most pages at full size, but you can scroll round using a minimap or you can zoom out so that more of the page fits on the screen at once. See the video above for a demonstration.
The E51 is an Eseries phone and as such it has support for many kinds of e-mail including Intellisync, Seven Always-On Mail, Visto Mobile, POP3 and IMAP4. Setting up an e-mail account is fairly painless thanks to the built-in setup wizard, and you can access your account by pressing the dedicated e-mail button on the keypad. New mails can be set to make the phone's white LED indicator blink, and the active standby screen displays the number of new unread mails.
Gaming
The E51 is an Eseries device and therefore supposed to be for businesspeople to do serious work on, but it's also an S60 3rd Edition device so it's compatible with all S60v3 games as well as Java J2ME and Flash Lite titles. You can also play games from many classic computers and consoles if you install an S60v3 emulator on the phone for the relevant system.
There are a couple of good free S60 games available from the E51's Download! service, Global Race and Global Cricket, both of which can be see in action in the video at the beginning of this review.
At 2 inches the screen is perhaps a bit small, but it makes games look very sharp, particularly those in 3D. The direction pad is okay-ish for gaming but not the best in the world, which is hardly surprising considering the business-oriented nature of this device.
GPS and Navigation
The E51 does not have any built-in GPS receiver, though you can buy Bluetooth GPS receivers separately and link them to the phone wirelessly.
However, you don't strictly speaking need a GPS receiver in order to use Nokia Maps. If you download and install Nokia Maps 2.0 for the E51 and set the positioning server to "supl.nokia.com" in the phone's settings menu, you can use Nokia Maps based entirely on your location relative to the nearest mobile phone masts. This isn't as accurate as real GPS, but it's good enough to tell you roughly where you are and what streets are around you.
You can also use Nokia Maps to look up addresses and various points of interest anywhere in the world, and even see them in real life in photo mode.
Nokia Maps 2.0 is free, but you have to pay extra if you want to use the route navigation feature (i.e. the thing that shows or tells you how to get from one place to another).
Other Interesting Stuff
As mentioned previously in this review, the E51 has some unusual keys which don't normally appear on S60 devices:
The usual S60 swirly menu key has been replaced with the logo of a house, which may confuse existing S60 users but may also be a much more memorable logo for new users. The usual S60 "C" key has been replaced with a backspace key, similar to the one on Nokia's QWERTY devices and Bluetooth keyboard.
In addition, there are also dedicated buttons for the Calendar, E-Mail and Contacts applications, all of which can be redefined if you prefer them to point to other apps (including third party apps).
Who would like this the most?
Someone who wants a small, light, durable phone that lets them keep in touch with the world. Businesspeople and other professionals who travel a lot, such as journalists, may appreciate the E51 the most. Indeed that's exactly who the phone was intended for by Nokia as part of their Eseries range.
Overall
When Nokia's popular 6120 Classic smartphone was released in mid-2007, a lot of people said it was a great phone but they were disappointed it didn't have Wi-Fi (aka WLAN). The E51 provides a physically very similar phone with slightly better specifications including Wi-Fi, so in some people's eyes this is what the 6120 should have been. It even has a similar price to the 6120, around 200 euros plus taxes at the time of writing.
However, the E51 has some downsides compared to the 6120: there's no front camera for video calls, there's no camera flash, and there are several extra buttons potentially making life more difficult on the keypad. It's also slightly heavier than the 6120.
Although a lot of people who buy the E51 aren't businesspeople, this is still clearly a phone intended for professionals, with its extra keypad keys, the support for corporate e-mail and the bundled business-oriented applications including a rather useful tool for managing groups.
If you're looking for a small and light S60 phone aimed at a more mainstream audience, you might want to check out the 5320 XpressMusic or the 6120/6121 Classic, which have relatively similar sizes, specifications and prices to the E51.
To get back to the E51 though, in general this is a very nice little phone. It gives you a full S60 device in a tough steel-coated package that looks very slick and businesslike, and the icing on the cake is the low price (the E51 is one of the cheapest smartphones in the world at the moment). The drawbacks are the crowded keypad and physically small screen, but if you can cope with these then you will probably get a lot out of the phone.
The Nokia Duck Says: Quack Quack Quack Quack
Photos (click to enlarge):
Technical Details:
Year of Launch: 2007
Weight: 100g
Size: 115mm x 47mm x 12 mm
Battery Life: Up to 4.3 hours talk time, up to 13 days standby time.
Phone: Quadband GSM 850/900/1800/1900, Dualband 3G WCDMA/UMTS 850/2100, includes support for EDGE and HSDPA (3.5G).
Screen: QVGA (240x320 pixels), 16 million colours, 2 inches physical size.
Camera: 2 megapixel photos, QVGA (320x240) videos at 15 fps.
Memory: 130 megabytes built-in storage space, microSDHC memory card slot, 50 megabytes free RAM.
Connections: MiniUSB socket, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi (WLAN), 2.5mm audio jack, infrared port, FM radio receiver.
Platform: Symbian S60 3rd Edition FP1
Software Compatibility: Symbian S60 3rd Edition (S60v3) games and apps, J2ME Java games and apps, Flash Lite 2.0 games and apps.
Other Notable Features: Includes dedicated keys on keypad for personal organiser functions including calendar, contacts and e-mail.
Click here to see the full official Nokia E51 technical specifications.
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