Nokia E50 review: Economy business class

Just another Symbian phonebook

The phonebook of Nokia E50 is a standard Symbian phonebook. As it uses the shared memory it is practically limitless. Search through contacts is possible by gradually typing the initial letters of the desired contact entry. When adding a new contact, the phone offers many different fields to assign as various numbers, address, email address, job, birthday, etc. The birthday, however, is not automatically transferred in the calendar.

Nokia E50 phonebook • Creating new contact entry • various fields

Instead of creating groups, Nokia decided to make Teams. This is an option which allows you to assign contacts in one team and then you can call the whole team, send SMS or email. You can also check their webpages, start Push-To-Talk or make a Conference Call.

New Team • Team actions

The log

The Calls Log in Nokia E50 is divided in three tabs: Missed calls, Received calls and Dialed numbers. If you enter it through the main menu you can see the Recent Calls, the Call duration and the Packet data information. Every tab of the calls log contains the last ten records. If somebody has called you more than once, the log organizes all his calls in one record, showing the date and time of the last one.

Log • Recent Calls • Call duration information

Missed call • Missed calls tab

SMS as usual

The Messaging menu in E50 is the same as in the other Nokia Symbian smartphones. Emails are managed easily as the phone supports POP3 and IMAP4 protocols. Attachment can be downloaded and viewed (if file format is supported, of course) as well. When reading a message, the text is distributed in eight lines en bloc. Writing is performed in 8 lines too. T9 dictionary is available to assist writing.

Messaging menu • Inbox • Reading & Writing a message

Music & Business altogether

The phone has the new Nokia music player, used in other Symbian smartphones from the latest Series 60 user interface. The player is very intuitive and even has a built-in equalizer which can be manually adjusted. When a song is played in background, the name and artist are shown on the active stand-by display.

Music player • Equalizer • Manual adjustment • Active stand-by display

The music quality is comparable to that of the rest of the recent Nokia smartphones. The Music player does play in stereo but in an effort to keep the price of the phone down Nokia has included only a mono in the retail package is mono, so obviously if you want to listen to stereo music you have to buy a stereo headset separately.

E50 supports the most common music file formats. It can also play some video clips. However, the display is not that good to display videos with good quality. The phone lacks FM radio.