Mobility Now

Recently I changed my E61i for a E51. I’ve been using this new phone for a while now and decided it was time to write a review. The E51 was released in November 2007 and is the latest in the business line from Nokia. The company has 2 main lines of products in their smartphones division: the N-series which focuses on high end camera and video features, and the E-series which focuses on stability and connectivity options.

Since I came from the E61i, I’ll start by listing the differences between the 2 phones. The phones are similar in many ways, but the E51 has key differences:

• Lack of a QWERTY keyboard
• Much better form factor (it’s smaller and thinner)
• Dual band 3G (high speed works in many North America areas, unlike the E61i)
• Slightly smaller battery (1050mAh instead of 1500mAh)
• Mini-USB port (instead of the old Pin-port)
• Headset jack
• Visual radio

Hardware

The main attraction of the E51 is the form factor. It truly is a gorgeous phone, solidly built, small and very thin (114.8 x 46 x 12 mm) and available in many colors (I picked black, as shown in the photo). This means of course no QWERTY keyboard, which makes it a no go if you require a full size keyboard. If form factor is more important to you than the QWERTY, then then you won’t find a better size for the amount of features.

Speaking of keyboard, the one on this phone is very nice. The keys seem solid to the touch and are easy to use. The keyboard has the standard number keys, a D-pad (which btw is not to be taken lightly, as someone who’ve gone from joysticks to D-pads, it’s such a huge improvement), a delete key and 4 custom keys. The custom keys link to the menu, calendar, contacts and mail. Also of note is that 3 of those keys can be customized to any other application, which is something you couldn’t do on the E61i.

On the top and sides there are buttons for power, volume up, down, mute and the voice recorder.

Connectivity

This phone is all about connectivity. It has GSM, EDGE and dual-band 3G (WCDMA 2100MHz and 850MHz) which means you get high speed 3.6Mbps data transfers where those frequencies are supported. This means all of Europe, most of Asia, and many of the newer networks in North America (it works fine using Rogers in Montreal).

The phone also has wi-fi 802.11g with built-in support for VOIP. It also has Bluetooth 2.0 (with A2DP), and USB using the mini-USB cable (with mass storage mode, which is very nice since you can connect it to any Windows PC and it allows you to transfer files right away, without the need to install drivers or PC Suite).

Finally it also has a standard 2.5 microphone jack, which means any headset with a (small) plug will work in it, which is also nicer than having to deal with the proprietary plugs.

CPU and memory

The phone has a surprisingly large amount of memory with 130Megs of user data memory and 96Megs of SDRAM. As a comparison, the E61i had 60Megs, and non-smartphones such as say the Moto RAZR has 10Megs. This means you can store many more applications, data and also run more apps at the same time. The phone also has a MicroSD card slot supporting cards up to 4GB (although people report using 6GB and 8GB cards fine).

This phone also has a 396MHz processor, which is an improvement over older E-series phones which had 220MHz CPUs. This means everything will run faster. And indeed, browsing menus and starting applications is visibly faster on this device. This has to be the fastest phone I’ve used.

Features

The E51 runs S60 9.2, which is the first E-series phone running this latest version as far as I know. It comes with all the usual S60 features, like contacts, calendar, notes, SMS, MMS, E-mail, Web (full S60 web browser with landscape browsing support), PTT, RealPlayer, Podcasting, Music Player, QuickOffice (read only, but upgradeable to edit mode), Maps (the phone has complete GPS, maps and localization search support built-in if you have a Bluetooth GPS receiver), recorder, Java support, and so on. It also has a FM radio with visual radio support. Plus, since S60 v3 is now a mature platform, the UI is rock solid.

S60 is a very versatile platform and I won’t go into details as to what all the features are or all the applications that can be added. You can basically do as much as you can on any other phone platform, if not more, using the wide array of tools built into S60. When you first turn on the phone there are a large amount of applications that help new users set things up. First there’s the language and time zone settings, then an installer to get any memory card applications installed, and a series of modules visible on the home screen that helps you setup E-mail, VOIP and so on.

Multimedia

The camera on the E51 is the 2MPx camera module that is the same as most other E-series phones. It takes 1600×1200 images and QVGA videos at 15fps. Those can then be stored in phone memory or on the memory card, or sent via E-mail, MMS or Bluetooth. The photo quality is average indoors, so it’s best for outdoor shots.

The music player, video player and gallery are the same ones as previous E-series phones. They are very functional and include all the basic features you’d expect, such as storing images in folders, marking files, copying and moving them, sending them off, viewing them as a slide show, listening to music and play lists, viewing videos locally or streaming (in RealPlayer format only, which is rather rare nowadays) and so on.

Compared with typical phones, the multimedia features are on-par or better, but compared with N-series they are very basic. This is not a phone aimed at high end multimedia users, and you won’t find on-phone photo editing, the enhanced N-series gallery, auto-focus or a flash.

Battery life

Even if it has a smaller battery than QWERTY phones in the same line (1050mAh versus 1500mAh), the battery life is still excellent. You can expect a week of standby time and 4h20mins of talk time. I can charge this phone over the weekend, and if I don’t use it much it will still be running by Friday.

Conclusion

As the latest smartphone in Nokia’s business line, this is a fantastic phone. As long as you don’t need QWERTY, and really this is not a negative, more like a personal choice of large QWERTY devices versus small form factor, this is the best phone out there. Currently going for $300 (without contract) from most online vendors, this phone is perfect for anyone who wants a stable smartphone with the most connectivity options possible.

In my E61i review, I gave that phone a 9.5, and this phone is clearly superior, mainly because of the better plugs, 3G support in my area, FM radio, and a faster interface. In fact, I can’t find any negative so far, and from reading forum threads, it seems to be a favorite from anyone who’ve gotten it. For the audience this phone is aimed at, this is the perfect choice.

Score: 10/10

You may have heard about Android in the past few months. It’s the new Google Mobile OS that they announced last November. Developed as part of a Google led initiative, and backed by over 30 companies including many major manufacturers like Motorola and HTC, the SDK has gotten many thousands of downloads by developers eager to try it out.

2007 was marked, at least as far as news coverage goes, by the iPhone. Will 2008 be the year of the Google phones? Now that Apple has released it’s iPhone SDK also, the race is on to know which platform will come out on top. It’s hard to say yet who will win, and part of that is because both platforms share so much in common. The iPhone itself uses a lot of the same software. The map application, for example, is Google Maps for Mobile on both platforms. The web browser is based on the same open source code. Both support things like Bluetooth, touch screens, and threaded SMS.

Google has the advantage of being device neutral. Android is a software platform, so it will be implemented on an array of phones from many companies. Both low end and high end phones will be able to use the same interface, and have access to the same applications.

The iPhone however came out first, and has the power of the Apple marketing machine behind it. While Google is a name that’s just as known, since they aren’t making the actual devices, who knows how much hype each manufacturer can put out for their respective Android-based devices.

I think in the end the consumers will benefit from the increased competition. It’s obvious that with such close offerings, each company will be pushed to improve faster, and bring out more innovation to stay ahead. It’s too early to say if 2008 will be the year of the Google phones, but one thing I’m certain is that this year will see just as much development in the mobile arena than last year did, if not more!

New products are rarely released worldwide. This is especially true in the mobile world. Phones appear in one region of the globe, then the rest of us get to wait a few months (if not years) to see it. The iPhone, for example, was the hottest phone of 2007, but only in the US. It’s still not available anywhere else.

Those delays can be understood, since companies have to prioritize based on stock and manpower. Market studies can also make them think that it’s not worth their bottom line to sell an item in a country if the demand might not be there. I do have to wonder why some companies go even father, however, and actively prevent products from being bought or shipped overseas. Product restrictions, DRM, or lack of support shouldn’t be the standard, it should be seen as a poor business practice.

There is no reason, for example, that a company would refuse to service an item that it sold simply because the item was purchased in another country. If a cellphone is bought in Hong Kong, and brought to Canada, then the company will often request that the owner contact the office in Hong Kong. Worse, this still happens when the phone is finally being sold locally.

What really pushes the boundary of understanding behavior, and the point of this article, is when this starts to happen with software. The main one which annoys me right now is the Microsoft Windows Live Messenger. You may recall in May 2007, when an official MSN client was found on the MSN China site. At first it worked globally, but soon they restricted it to China and Taiwan only.

Almost a full year later, this restriction is still in place. While we have dozens of third party applications available on various phones that can connect to the Windows Live system, they still restrict their official player. Is it to force people to use Windows Mobile devices to have an official client? Who knows.

Now today I found out they have yet another client. This time it seems they followed in Yahoo!’s footsteps and made a full featured client for Live Mail, Messenger, Search, and so on. But what do we see? It’s only available to European countries. Sigh. Who would have thought Microsoft was a US company.

I’m sure there’s a reason, presented to management, behind closed doors, which must have made alot of sense at the time. But the reality is people will just use third party clients, or find some hack to use it. And what this means is we get partial support of the features, or people go to other services such as Yahoo! or Google. I would think the goal of free services such as Instant Messaging and web mail would be to get as many people to use them as possible. But apparently the hardware model is just as used in the software domain. And it’s a damn shame.