I've been given a new Nokia E51 for work to replace my old Motorola MAXX V6.
Up until now, I'd been using my own Nokia E71 since I didn't like the Motorola.
The E51 is nice and light. It's 1.2 cm thick, which is actually slightly thicker than the E71, but it's still very thin. Fits in my pocket nicely.
The battery is 1050 mAh compared to the E71's 1500 mAh, but I still haven't had to charge it after two days of light use. I suspect it'll last about two days of moderate use, which is fine.
The default menus are as bad as the Nokia E71's with all the icons for office, Adobe PDF, ZIP manager, and a bunch of stuff you'll never ever click on. You can't remove any of them, but you can move them to a new folder, so I made a folder called "More" and moved them all in there, out of the way.
The active standby screen is cluttered, and wraps poorly (if it didn't show the meeting end time and wrapped on spaces it would look much better), and for some reason the media player section only appears when you're playing something, so I found it easier to turn that off and gain use of my left/right/up/down shortcuts.
The phone was supplied by Telstra, so it also comes with a Telstra theme, Telstra screensaver, and the right soft key (a.k.a. navi key) going to a Telstra web page. The Telstra theme is pretty bad, so I replaced it with tehkseven's Prestige Solace theme, which I think is nice, plain, and stylish.
You can also change all the shortcut keys, including the right soft key, so no major drama there.
Unlike the E71, you can't type a person's name from the home screen to call them. You can't even type it in the New SMS screen, instead you have to click the main button in the To field, which opens up the address book. Again, no big problem.
Like the E71, it has a 2.5 mm headphone socket, and comes with the HS-47 headphones, which fall apart all too easily.
Unlike the E71, it supports USB 2.0, so copying music and podcasts should be much quicker.
For some reason there's no separate Podcast menu. Instead you have to copy them from your PC and find them under the artist in the music library.
The text messaging defaults to multi tap, so you'll have to press the # button a few times to make it use T9 predictive text. Couldn't find anything in the settings to change it.
Also strange is that it now completes user-defined words in preference to standard words (I added "ip" to the dictionary, and now typing 4 then 7 turns into "ip" rather than "is"). Sony Ericssons do that, but I think it's a bad idea, because it means you can't type blind: you can never be sure what it's going to do (in computing terms, it's non-deterministic).
There's a whole bunch of new keys that I think are pointless (home, phone book, calendar, and messaging), and it's hard to press left navi + star to lock the keypad: you have to press very deliberately at the bottom of the star key otherwise it won't register.
Also disappointing is that is uses miniUSB rather than microUSB for connectivity, so that's yet another different cable you'll have to keep around. (The E71 uses microUSB.)I'm not sure if it charges over USBIt doesn't charge over the miniUSB cable .
The camera is 2 MP compared to the E71's 3.2 MP, but I'm not using the phone as a camera, so I don't mind.
The one definite upside of the E51 is that it supports Telstra Next G on the 850 MHz band, so now when I'm travelling in the country, my reception will be MUCH better. Even if I put my 3 SIM card in there, it will use most of Telstra's Next G towers, so I'm way better off (3 "MEGA G" coverage maps).
The other thing to say is that while the E51 is essentially the same phone as the E71 (same ARM processor, same Symbian S60 v3 FP1 OS), it feels much more like a simple phone than a smart phone. I actually much prefer the E51 because of that, since the E71 sets up high expectations and then barely meets them, whereas the E51 sets lower expectations and meets them.
It also supports WiFi and VoIP. I haven't tried the VoIP so far (maybe work will give me a SIP account soon), but if you have access to a wireless network, try installing SmartConnect via the Download! menu; it could reduce your data costs substantially.
Oh, and it doesn't have a built-in GPS, but the Nokia GPS Navigator software costs money, and Google Maps is mostly for novelty value so far, so I won't miss it too much.
So far I'd give it 4 out of 5. I'm planning on using it as my main phone.
The Nokia E51
Up until now, I'd been using my own Nokia E71 since I didn't like the Motorola.
The E51 is nice and light. It's 1.2 cm thick, which is actually slightly thicker than the E71, but it's still very thin. Fits in my pocket nicely.
The battery is 1050 mAh compared to the E71's 1500 mAh, but I still haven't had to charge it after two days of light use. I suspect it'll last about two days of moderate use, which is fine.
The default menus are as bad as the Nokia E71's with all the icons for office, Adobe PDF, ZIP manager, and a bunch of stuff you'll never ever click on. You can't remove any of them, but you can move them to a new folder, so I made a folder called "More" and moved them all in there, out of the way.
The active standby screen is cluttered, and wraps poorly (if it didn't show the meeting end time and wrapped on spaces it would look much better), and for some reason the media player section only appears when you're playing something, so I found it easier to turn that off and gain use of my left/right/up/down shortcuts.
The phone was supplied by Telstra, so it also comes with a Telstra theme, Telstra screensaver, and the right soft key (a.k.a. navi key) going to a Telstra web page. The Telstra theme is pretty bad, so I replaced it with tehkseven's Prestige Solace theme, which I think is nice, plain, and stylish.
Telstra theme
Prestige theme
You can also change all the shortcut keys, including the right soft key, so no major drama there.
Unlike the E71, you can't type a person's name from the home screen to call them. You can't even type it in the New SMS screen, instead you have to click the main button in the To field, which opens up the address book. Again, no big problem.
Like the E71, it has a 2.5 mm headphone socket, and comes with the HS-47 headphones, which fall apart all too easily.
Nokia HS-47 headphones
Unlike the E71, it supports USB 2.0, so copying music and podcasts should be much quicker.
For some reason there's no separate Podcast menu. Instead you have to copy them from your PC and find them under the artist in the music library.
The text messaging defaults to multi tap, so you'll have to press the # button a few times to make it use T9 predictive text. Couldn't find anything in the settings to change it.
Also strange is that it now completes user-defined words in preference to standard words (I added "ip" to the dictionary, and now typing 4 then 7 turns into "ip" rather than "is"). Sony Ericssons do that, but I think it's a bad idea, because it means you can't type blind: you can never be sure what it's going to do (in computing terms, it's non-deterministic).
There's a whole bunch of new keys that I think are pointless (home, phone book, calendar, and messaging), and it's hard to press left navi + star to lock the keypad: you have to press very deliberately at the bottom of the star key otherwise it won't register.
Also disappointing is that is uses miniUSB rather than microUSB for connectivity, so that's yet another different cable you'll have to keep around. (The E71 uses microUSB.)
The camera is 2 MP compared to the E71's 3.2 MP, but I'm not using the phone as a camera, so I don't mind.
The one definite upside of the E51 is that it supports Telstra Next G on the 850 MHz band, so now when I'm travelling in the country, my reception will be MUCH better. Even if I put my 3 SIM card in there, it will use most of Telstra's Next G towers, so I'm way better off (3 "MEGA G" coverage maps).
The other thing to say is that while the E51 is essentially the same phone as the E71 (same ARM processor, same Symbian S60 v3 FP1 OS), it feels much more like a simple phone than a smart phone. I actually much prefer the E51 because of that, since the E71 sets up high expectations and then barely meets them, whereas the E51 sets lower expectations and meets them.
It also supports WiFi and VoIP. I haven't tried the VoIP so far (maybe work will give me a SIP account soon), but if you have access to a wireless network, try installing SmartConnect via the Download! menu; it could reduce your data costs substantially.
Oh, and it doesn't have a built-in GPS, but the Nokia GPS Navigator software costs money, and Google Maps is mostly for novelty value so far, so I won't miss it too much.
So far I'd give it 4 out of 5. I'm planning on using it as my main phone.
Labels: 2009, Communications, Computing, Mobile
Nokia E51 is the best lookout as well as good sound clarity, picture clarity...
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