If you are an executive in the market for a cell phone, Nokia’s E series offers the best bang for the buck. The E51 has a superb 2-inch display capable of 16 million colours. The resolution of 240 x 320 is very high for a small screen, so fonts appear sharp and crisp. In direct sunlight, the screen is completely legible-even at half the maximum rightness! As compared to the E50, the new phone has a completely revised keypad with dedicated keys for contacts, Calendar, E-mail, and Home.This approach has its advantages: you can directly access essential information at thetouch of a button. The soft menu keys, however, are a pain to use-they are too small for comfort. The keypad is a delight to use-good tactile feedback, and the key spacing is immaculate. The rubberised keys for volume up down, push to talk, and the power switch are hard to operate, and require some serious poking to work. The E51 is peppy-it uses the same processor as the flagship N95 model. With 130 MB of memory onboard, you can do lot of multitasking without the phone getting slow, and the memory can be expanded to 4 GB via the microSD slot. The E51 runs on Symbian OS S60, and crams in a lot of additional features. For example, the Advanced Call Manager lets you manage incoming and outgoing calls more efficiently. WorldMate, an application meant for frequent fliers, comes bundled too. The Nokia E51 has an abundance of connectivity options. It’s a 3G quad-band phone with HSDPA, WiFi (802.11g), Bluetooth, Micro USB, as well as infrared (just in case). The WiFi locator feature helps a great deal in searching for nearby WiFi hotspots. Multimedia features include an MP3 player (it sounds good), a 2MP camera with still and video shooting, and FM radio. The phone performed admirably during our tests; signal reception was good, and so was the voice clarity. Internet browsing was fast as compared to the E50 or E61, thanks to the revised Web browser. The pictures from the camera were above average, but not in low light. The speakerphone is clear, with little or no echo on the recipient’s side. The speaker is placed on the anterior side of the phone, and though it’s loud enough, when it’s placed on softer surfaces such as a bed or sofa, the ringer volume gets muffled. Battery life is good-we got around three days with nominal usage and a terrific seven days of standby.
