Nokia E50 review: Economy business class

No 3G or Wi-Fi

Quad-band GSM, GPRS, EDGE, Blackberry, USB, Bluetooth and Infrared are available in Nokia E50. However, there is no 3G networks support or Wi-Fi connectivity. Considering the low price of the handset, this is easily explained. PC synchronization is seamless using USB, Bluetooth or Infrared. Using the PC Suite (you can download it for free from the Nokia website) you can copy you calendar, phonebook and messages into your computer or counter wise.

Connectivity sub-menu

Perfect Symbian browser

The web browser in Nokia E50 is the same as in most of the latest Symbian phones manufactured by Nokia. It is perfect. It has a mouse cursor for navigation, opens Flash and java pages and has multi-tasking. It can also display the whole page and a highlighted area which indicated where exactly on the page are you zoomed in.

A great web browser

Organizer

The Calendar of the phone has its own icon in the Main Menu. Surprisingly, the Organizer sub-menu is absent in E50 and most of the applications are in the Office folder. To make it easier, we will summarize the whole folder in this chapter, but first let’s begin with the Calendar. It has four views: month, week, day and To-do view. You can assign entries with Subject, location and Start and End dates. You can also put an alarm to an entry.

Calendar view modes

The Office folder contains the File manager, an application named Search, a Calculator, the Teams icon, Quickoffice, Notes, Converter, Message reader, Adobe PDF and Zip. The Search application is used to search for a string in Messages, E-mails, Calendar events, Contacts, Other files, To-dos, etc. The Calculator is a basic one with very intuitive interface.

Office sub-menu • In-device search • Search results • Calculator

The Quickoffice icon stands for three applications used for opening Word, Excel and PowerPoint files. They allow read-only use of the files, which is better than nothing, however. The Notes application needs no presentation; it is used for writing short (and not so short) texts. It can be synchronized with PC. The Converter is an application for converting different measures and units.

Word file • Excel file • Notes • Converter

The Message reader is an application for reading text messages. The phone reads messages in English with a metallic voice. We haven’t tried making it read a message in other language but it’s pretty sure that it will be mostly funny. The Adobe PDF is for opening and reading PDF files. The Zip application is for managing Zip archives.

Message reader • Adobe PDF

Others

There is a Voice aid application in the phone which assists you by reading titles and subjects, as well as tells you the current time, etc. There is also a Real player application for playing video files. The Recorder application is located in the Media sub-menu. It has the standard Nokia smartphone limit of 1 minute recording, which is considered highly grotesque, as the phone has 70 MB internal memory. Regrettably, Nokia E50 has no preinstalled games.

Finally…

For conclusion we must say that we expect market success of E50 and this is not only among business users. The version with a camera will probably grab some the 3250 buyers, for example. When compared to the other phones of the E-serie, E50 is a good choice for those who can live without the Wi-Fi but appreciate the small sizes and low price. The phone is also a possible upgrade for 6230i users who would like to try using a smartphone. Whatever happens, the low price will keep the sale numbers high.