Phone rating: 
In a nutshell: The Nokia E51 is a powerful communications device equipped with email, a wealth of organiser applications, web browser, camera and media player. With 3G HSDPA and WLAN it can connect to a wide range of networks and devices. It's also a slimline and lightweight phone that looks good and is very easy to use. In our opinion, its one of the best business phones available.
Best buy: *Free* from Vodafone Business Shop.
The Nokia E51 is a business smartphone that is packed with useful features. It's a slim phone with classic looks, although with a rugged edge to its appearance too. Although it lacks the QWERTY keypad of a BlackBerry, it's still a competent email device, and unlike the very disappointing E50, the E51 really does deliver on its potential.
The E51 is available in a choice of three colours - black, silver and pink - although the front face of the phone remains black, with just the edge and back changing colour. Design-wise, this is a no-nonsense easy-to-use phone, with a classic shape, a nice conventional keypad and a 5-way navigation key for easy scrolling and selection. There are also some handy shortcut buttons for email, calendar, contacts and the active standby screen. On the right side is a mute key next to the volume keys. On the left side you'll find a Push to Talk key and a voice recorder key. An LED indicator is used to notify you of new email and messages, as well as missed calls. It's a nice-sized phone too, and very slim, at just 12mm. First impressions are excellent - the E51 looks and feels like a quality device.
The LCD display is a large 2-inch TFT screen with high resolution (240 x 320 pixels) and 16 million colours. An ambient light sensor is used to automatically adjust the brightness of the display. This is a great screen, and is ideally suited to the functionality of the phone. When not in use, the display reverts to active standby mode, where it shows a summary of the day's activities and provides quick access to common applications.
The primary functions of the E51 are to communicate and to organise, and it does both of these jobs well. Email support is comprehensive with support for POP3, IMAP4, and SMTP protocols and attachment viewers for all common file formats. Web browsing is also competent, with a fully functional web browser doing the best it can with the available screen size. The E51 is a 3G HSDPA phone, so download speeds are fast (up to 3.6 Mbps), and it also supports quadband GSM, so you should be able to use it anywhere in the world. You can connect to a PC using a WLAN connection. The WLAN connection also enables VoIP calls.
The applications supplied with the phone include:
- File Manager & search function
- Organiser tools: Contacts, calendar, to-do list, weather, world clocks and a currency converter
- Windows Live provides mobile access to Windows Live Messenger and Windows Live Hotmail
- Nokia Team Suite for organising and facilitating group conference calls, email messages, or text messages
- Viewers for Excel, Word, PowerPoint & PDF documents
- Active Notes for creating notes with rich text and multimedia
- Yahoo! Go: get your email, news, maps, and more all from the same customised web page
- ZIP file extractor
- Support for Nokia Intellisync Mobile Suite with email, file synchronisation, voice, and device management
- Support for Symantec, F-Secure, McAfee, and Trend Micro antivirus software
You can also download and install third-party Symbian and Java applications of course.
In addition, the E51 packs in plenty of multimedia functions. These include a 2 megapixel camera with video recording and video calling capabilities. The phone includes both a music player and an FM radio too. A standard Nokia headset supplied, which connects to the 2.5 mm headset socket, and the phone is also compatible with Bluetooth stereo headsets.
The E51 has a very generous onboard memory of 130 Mbytes to support all of the functionality, and usefully it can support microSD cards up to the new 4 Gbyte size.
Battery life isn't bad, although with slim phones there's always a compromise here. Unless you're a really heavy user you won't have a problem with the E51.
All things considered, the Nokia E51 is one of the nicest business phones that we've seen for a while. It lacks the full keypad of a BlackBerry, but apart from that limitation, this is an almost perfect implementation of a business phone. It's very easy to use, very powerful and it looks great too! Highly recommended.
Features of the Nokia E51 include:
- Series 60 3rd Edition Symbian SmartPhone
- 2 megapixel camera with 4x digital zoom
- Video camera
- Display: TFT, 16 million colours, 240 x 320 pixels (2 inches)
- Music Player (AAC, eAAC+, WMA formats)
- FM radio with Visual Radio support
- MP3 ringtones
- Speakerphone
- Voice memo recording
- Messaging: SMS, MMS, email (POP3, IMAP4 and SMTP protocols), Instant Messaging (supports Yahoo, AOL, OMA 1.2, MSN)
- Attachment viewer for Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel
- Symbian and Java� MIDP 2.0 applications
- Contacts, calendar and to-do list: supports PC synchronisation with Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Notes via Nokia PC Suite
- Internet: xHTML web browser, WAP, GPRS, EDGE, HSDPA up to 3.6 Mbps
- Connectivity: Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0, InfraRed & WLAN (IEEE 802.11g)
- Memory: 130 Mbytes plus support for microSD cards (up to 4 Gbytes)
- WAP, GPRS, EDGE
- Vibration alert
- Quadband (850/900/1800/1900) plus 3G (WCDMA 850/2100)
- Size: 115 x 46 x 12 mm
- Weight: 100g
- Talktime: 4.4 hours
- Battery standby: 312 hours
