Nokia E51 Review

19.02.09 – 22:39

A week ago I got my new mobile, a Nokia E51. I bought it at eBay second hand but unused for 150 Euro. It’s from Nokia’s business line and runs Symbian S60 v3.

I have the Simyo 1GB data plan for 10€/month. After one week of pretty extensive use I only used about 20 MB of traffic, so I may cancel the plan again. The 3G coverage of E-Plus/Simyo is really bad. I can hardly remember to have seen the 3G logo and I definitly never experienced something like 3G speed. At least GPRS works fine. And it has Wifi supporting all kinds of encryptions.

Because Specs aren’t interesting, i’ll just do a I like/I do not like list.

I like

• Size is just fine
• Display is well readable even in sun
• Menu customizable to a pleasant modest style
• Shortcuts customizable
• Mail client does it’s job
• Network connection is very good (high SAR value)
• Battery capacity is okay (2 Days / Average Use / Twibble + Fring online via GPRS)
• Battery charged to full in 90 Minutes
• Fully syncable with Mac
• Use it as a bluetooth modem
• Allows background applications
• Some nice apps available for S60

I do not like

• Internal Camera only makes blurry green tinted pictures
• Mail client is sloooooow
• Nearly insensible sidebuttons
• Wifi drains battery big time
• Developers didn’t flip every stone to make it easy to use

Some apps I constantly use:

Fring
Chat Client supporting various services. Use it with ICQ and Skype. Skype calls are also possible, but suffer from a short to unbearable delay. Fring still lacks some convenient functions like history or groups but does it’s instant messanging job well. Connectivity is stable.

Twibble
Twitter client. Automatic update, easy to use, no lack of function discovered yet.

Fring and Twibble work fine with GPRS, may run in background and do not drain too much battery.

Browsers

• Default Nokia
  The default nokia is slow and not actually userfirendly. And you cannot change the default browser Nevertheless it somehow does it’s job.
• Opera Mini
  Opera offers more convenient features and renders pretty fast.
• Skyfire
  Skyfire renders a website on an external server and only delivers images of the webpage to the mobile. Their aim is to deliver the same internet experience as on a “big” browser. Furthermore it offers Flash support and e.g. works with youtube or spiegel.de videos and the soundcloud player. But it is very slow with GPRS and also doesn’t reach sufficient speed over Wifi. From it’s concept it is completely anti-privacy, because all data is processed on the skyfire proxy.

I tried to integrate the phone into my simplified GTD, but after iSync deleted my whole Calender, I got too discouraged to continue. I’ll stick to paper for now.

And just to get the iPhone discussion out of the way: It’s too expensive, a bit too big and I just can’t get the weak battery plus expensive battery replacement out of my head. But maybe I’ll buy one later someday …