Nokia E51 Review

Messaging:

For a phone to function as a mobile office, it must be able to handle messages very well. Like the other Symbian phones, in the Messaging menu you will find everything arranged. By the New Message button you can start writing a text/multimedia or e-mail message. The T9 system can help you input text faster. It works very easy which is typical of Nokia phones.

Inbox is a shared box for the received text and multimedia messages as well as for messages received via Bluetooth. Unlike the N-series, here the headings of the individual letters are visualized by smaller font so that more can be fitted on a single screen. This is so because it is assumed that the business users use/receive lots of messages and should be able to view them faster.

The email is set by means of a Wizard which saves you a lot of writing by automatically ‘completing’ part of the settings. If you know how to configure your e-mail, this will take one to two minutes and then you will be able to use it in your phone. You can preset your phone to download headers only and then a whole message when you want to view it, or download up to a fixed limit (a limit in KB set by you) or directly download the whole letters together with the attached files. We made the settings using the first possibility and downloaded separate messages via WiFi or using the UMTS operator’s net.


Connectivity:

Nokia E51 is quad-band GSM phone supporting 3G UMTS/HSDPA at 850/2100 MHz bands, which means that is has one of the US 3G frequencies and the one for Europe/Asia.

E51 supports WiFI 802.11g which is the standard for a wireless LAN network. By the link in the active standby screen you can find and connect to networks whose range covers you and use Internet connection via them. This is very convenient because you don’t depend on the operator’s coverage.

Using WiFi or HSDPA data, loading and viewing standard HTML web pages is easy job. The phone has no problem rendering all pages and reading phoneArena's news was a pleasure. Scrolling left-to-right and top-to-bottom is done with the phone's d-pad, and a mini-map shows you, which part of the page you are looking at.

What we loved about it is the history: when you use 'back' to see pages you've seen earlier, you see the pages as thumbnails you can open from the phone's cache.