Camera:
Besides the business functions the E50 also features the standard multimedia capabilities offered by a Series 60 phone a camera and music/video player. The camera resolution is only 1.3 megapixels, which is poor according to the current standards as there are already phones with 3-megapixel cameras on the market. But it is not intended to be a key feature of the E50, as the phone even has a version without a camera at all. The camera's interface does not even take up the whole display and the Viewfinder only occupies half of it, while the options available are color effects, white balance and night mode, which almost useless.
As far as picture quality is concerned, the E50 camera definitely can not replace your digital camera and the image quality is a standard one compared to other phones with 1.3-megapixel camera in order to get the best out of the camera you need a lot of light, but this may also cause overexposure and purple fringing of large areas of the picture. The noise levels are too high when the lighting conditions are not good enough and when taking pictures indoors, it is almost impossible to make them look normal. There's no flash to help you out in dark conditions and the night mode is useless although the slightly better results.
Multimedia:
The phone definitely can not be a rival of iPOD too, and the interface of the music player is definitely prettier than the one of the camera. But it's still not quite comfortable moving through the options can only be done with up and down directions and the buttons are so small that you have to stare at the display if you want to see what each of them does this is a total waste of space and resolution. The Music Library menu allows you to sort your songs in MP3 or AAC format by Artist, Album, Genre, Composer, and we find the Track Lists option to be an interesting idea as it allows you to select the most played songs for example. The music player works fine in background mode thanks to the multitask capabilities of the smartphone, while the beautiful homescreen displays the songs that's played and the time elapsed by pointing at it you are allowed to adjust the sound volume of the player without even opening it.
Software:
The phone can use applications based both on the Java platform and Symbian S60, which provides wide 3rd party software compatibility like any other smartphone. Installation is a piece of cake, while additional programs increase the software's capabilities very much and thus it can be personalized to better suit you. The phone comes with various applications, as well as a few games, one of which is the 3rd version of Snake.
E50 has 70MB of internal memory and it can be expanded with a microSD card. The slot for the latter is located under the battery cover but hot-swap is still supported. However, that's quite inconvenient and we'd rather have the port on one of the two sides of the phone, even if there's no protective cover we'd sacrifice the style and the design of the phone for a little convenience.
