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.

The E50 is intended as a lightweight SmartPhone for the business user who’s not interested in having a camera, MP3 player, etc on their phone. There is a camera, but it’s not up to much, and is in fact optional. On the other hand, the E50 has a good set of business functions: a good speakerphone, voice dialling and commands, email support, web browsing and an attachment viewer for Microsoft documents. It supports Bluetooth 2.0 wireless connectivity in addition to USB and infrared. Memory is ample, with 70 Mbytes built-in and support for hot-swappable memory cards. The E50 is quadband, but not 3G. However, fast downloads via EDGE are possible, so this isn’t too much of a hindrance. On top of this, the Symbian Series 60 functionality makes this a powerful business device. The E50 also has superb battery life.

There are, however, numerous problems with the E50. First of all, like many Symbian SmartPhones, its user interface is slow and the software is prone to crashing. Also, like many of our users have commented, the font size is tiny, so it’s hard to make use of the advanced features. Given that the target user is likely to be older than average, this is an inexcusable design fault. The Nokia E60 is a much better option.

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