Nokia E51

Discontinued
20th September 2007

The Nokia E51 is Nokia's new entry-level phone in the E-Series business range, replacing the Nokia E50 which unfortunately failed to make much of an impression on customers.

"Entry level" is a term that might be a little misleading here. The E51 is a very highly specified handset compared with most of the Nokia range, however the new features that Nokia have included in the E51 really signify that Nokia want to take the E-series of handsets to the next level.

This is a Symbian S60 3rd Edition smartphone, and the Nokia E51 is a quad-band GSM 850/900/1900/1900 MHz phone with dual band UMTS 850/2100 MHz which will make it useful for business travellers. Unlike the E50, the Nokia E51 now adds UMTS (3G) and HSDPA (3.5G) plus WiFi. This makes the E51 useful as an accessory for a laptop, and the inclusion of WiFi also opens up the possibility of using the handset for voice over IP (VOIP), especially with a corporate VOIP gateway - Nokia provide solutions that will work with Cisco and Alcatel systems. At Mobile Gazette, we think that corporate VOIP using devices of this type is likely to be a major growth area during 2008.

Back to the phone - there's the now familiar 240x320 pixel display in 16 million colours that is common to many other Nokia devices. There's 130MB of internal memory expandable with a microSD slot, Bluetooth and of course all the usual features you'd expect from a Nokia  There's also an FM radio and of course a multimedia player.

One controversial feature of the Nokia E51 is bound to be the inclusion of a 2 megapixel camera on the back. Many businesses simply do not want cameras on their phones because they represent a security risk in some areas. We very much hope that the E51 comes in an optional no-camera configuration as an alternative.

Nokia have tweaked the interface a little, and there's now a "Home" button instead of the S60 menu key to give access to commonly used applications. There's also a dedicated email key plus a "new message" indicator light. The E51 supports Nokia Intellisync and it's quite likely that there will be a range of push email solutions available for it.

At 100 grams, the Nokia E51 is pretty light for a 3G phone with WiFi and a QVGA display. Talktime has been quoted as a somewhat disappointing four and a half hours or so, we don't know if that's on 3G or 2G though. Standby time is around 13 days.

The Nokia E51 will be priced at around €350 before tax and subsidy, comes in Silver, Black and Rose colour combinations and should be available during Q4 2007.