Nokia E50 is another Series 60 Symbian 9.1 smartphone from the famous Finnish manufacturer. It’s the small sizes and ergonomic shape that attract most of the attention. The new quad-band handset has connectivity features like Infrared, Bluetooth, USB, GPRS and EDGE. As it comes at a low price, it will be a phone with many fans. Packed with features in small dimensions, coming at the right price, E50 is surely a bright addition on the GSM phones’ market shelves.

Main features:

• Narrow body and light construction

• Very fast response of the user interface

• 1.3 megapixel camera with QCIF video

• GPRS/EDGE, Bluetooth, USB and Infrared

• 70 MB internal memory

• microSD memory card slot

At first sight Nokia E50 strongly reminds of the Sony J70, which was a popular phone some years ago. Its long and narrow shape is quite distinctive. Probably the fans of J70 would enjoy the new E50 too. There are two versions of the handset, one with camera and one without. Their model names are respectively E50-1 and E50-2. Nokia wisely decided to launch a mid-to-low class Symbian smartphone as this is a huge market hole for people who need the features of a smartphone but cannot afford the more expensive ones. What is more, E50 performs very well.

The design of E50 is rather conservative. It is mostly silver and black which merge in some areas and create a pretty ergonomic impression. The phone is not flat and the keypad part is positioned lower than the rest of the body. This leads to a significant ease when writing. The joystick bulks in front of everything and smashes to pieces the nice impression of the otherwise perfect design of the phone.

The phone’s size can be very well understood when compared to other phones. We have made such comparisons for our readers with N93 and E70. You can see that E50 is smaller, narrower and thinner than both phones. All three smartphones run on the same Symbian OS with Series 60 user interface.

Nokia E50 is flawless in terms of construction. We could only mention the On/Off button which is made as part of a plastic cap, situated on the top of the phone. It’s quite sure that after some time of use this plastic cap will have scars from the user’s nails. Nokia could have thought about that. Besides this minor issue, we must say that the rest of the construction elements are absolutely perfect. No creeks were produced, every part stays in its place and the phone seems unbreakable.

The phone’s front has the main speaker on its top and a white Nokia sign below it. Then come the 240 x 320 pixels TFT display and the keypad, which is divided in two parts (as most smartphones): functional and numeric. The back of the phone is much, much simpler. It contains nothing more than a incrusted Nokia sign on the top, the camera lens (if any) and the silver (all real metal) battery cover with the release button on its bottom.

The left side of E50 is for the Infrared receiver and the dual-volume buttons. We fancy the design solution of the sides as they combine silver and black in a quite irregular way which makes it a great combination. The right side is designed in the same manner, of course, and consists of two buttons: the Pencil Edit button and a button for Voice commands and Voice dialing. A single press brings up the Voice commands dialog and a long press is for Voice dialing.

The bottom of the phone is reserved for the Pop-port and the charger port. E50’s charger is of the new ones, with the thinner jack. The top of the phone shelters the On/Off button only and it is more than enough to say that this is the worst part of the phone. As we previously said, this button is a great fault in the otherwise good phone.

Under the metal battery cover is the BL-5C 970 mAh Li-Ion battery which is said to endure up to 215 hours of stand by time and up to 6 hours and 40 minutes of talk time.

Unfortunately, we couldn’t test the phone’s battery life since we used the phone heavily during our tests and thus the battery life we experienced was not indicative for the real-life performance of the phone.

The SIM card bed is located beneath the battery. The microSD card slot is on the left side of the black panel. This means that it can be hot-swapped without taking off the battery but you must remove the battery cover first.

Nokia E50 keypad is made of a nice plastic which makes touch and feel quite pleasant. Writing with it is not a problem at all. It is divided in two parts: functional and numeric. The numeric part is absolutely standard, the buttons are separately leveled for user’s convenience. The upper, functional part consists of two soft keys on the top row, the joystick in the middle, the Menu and correction C buttons in the seconds raw and the Green and Red “receiver” buttons on the bottom row. The only controversial thing about the keypad is the plastic joystick. It is quite hard and sharp in touch and leaves awful first impressions. But after some time of use you get more than used to it and appreciate its severity as an advantage.

The keypad of E50 assists for fast and easy writing as it is made ergonomically positioned for easy access of the thumbs. The buttons are leveled in an stair-like way which navigates the user’s finger when sliding to find the correct button. Writing in dark conditions shouldn’t be a problem too as the backlighting of the phone is great. It glows in a deep blue color.

The display implemented in this phone is a TFT one capable of displaying 256K colors at 240 x 320 pixels resolution. As the phone is aimed for the cheaper market hole, it is not packed with a QVGA display of 16 million colors but this one performs quite well. The picture is quite vivid and clear. Regrettably, when looked under direct sunlight the display is almost illegible. Backlighting, on the other side, is quite good.

The signal strength of the phone is great, as can be expected from a 2006 model. The clarity of sound during conversation is also good.

Symbian 9.1 with Series 60 user interface was by far an expensive toy. With this latest addition on the smartphone shelve, Nokia have unlocked the door for everybody. We have done several reviews of other phones with S60 interface running on Symbian 9.1 so we might use some extracts from previous reviews as they stand correct for E50 also.

The active stand-by display is made of 6 icons of frequently used applications. Below this row is a list of calendar events, currently played songs, missed calls or received messages. If none of this events occur, the list is empty and displays “No cal. entries for today”. The top part of the stand-by display is for the signal strength bar, the date and time, the operator name, and battery level bar.

The main menu can be viewed as a matrix grid of 3 x 4 icons or as a list. Most of the sub-menus can be also viewed as grid or list but there are several sub-menus which are in list view only. The speed of the menu is remarkable and Nokia deserves complements for it.

Nokia E50 has 70 MB internal shared memory and a microSD card slot for further extension. In a previous chapter we mentioned the hotswap card slot under the battery cover. The phone has no preinstalled themes except for the default blue one. The Send Msg function is available in this phone. This feature allows you to send a predefined message to the caller if you cannot answer now.

The ringing profiles in Nokia E50 are 6 predefined and the user can create new ones. There is an offline mode which deactivates the phone features of the device. This can be used as a Flight mode. The File manager of the phone can be substituted by the Gallery application which performs perfectly as well. The Clock application in the Main Menu is for defining the current time and adding other cities and time zones.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The camera in Nokia E50 is a 1.3 megapixel one. It produces quite nice pictures and has interesting settings. Exposure compensation is not present, which is essential, but White balance is available. Self-timer, color tone settings and image size adjustments are available also. As E50 is not a camera phone, it shoots in vertical mode only.

Video can be recorded in QCIF resolution but the result is disastrous. Picture quality is very poor and the frame rate is very low. The sound is even worse than the picture.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.