Waves

Yep! it’s true. The news is out. I purchased a brand new Nokia E51. The device has not yet been listed on the Nokia Asia site as of 4 days ago. Support activities don’t accept E51 as a model. Even many mobile shops in Chennai do not know about a device called E51. It was first released world wide on September 2007 according to gsmarena.com and its specs arrived on my rss reader just a few days ago 😀 To tell about the device, its truly awesome! Battery life comes close to 2 and a half days, which is pretty good for a smart phone. It is a Series 60 3rd edition phone with feature pack 1, running Symbian OS v9.1. Supports lots of applications and most importantly, supports many of the latest Java ME APIs. This means that, I can now try a whole new range of applications which was not possible using my old phone.

Since E51 is supposedly a “business class” device :P, it supports all modes of connection.. such as bluetooth, infrared, wifi, usb, push-to-talk and the usual sms, ems, email, mms etc. It also supports VoIP over LAN. Therefore, when my office provides wifi, I can use the in-house SIP server to communicate to colleagues directly from my mobile ;-). The screen resolution is very good. It has a light sensor on top left of the phone which adjusts the display on the amount of external light available. The keypad is very comfortable. There are 4 dedicated keys for doing 8 specific operations, 6 of which can be customised. Apart from that, you can configure the 6 quick launch icons available from the phone’s standby mode, not to mention the 2 soft keys. Apart from all this, there is 1 touch access to switch on bluetooth, browser and silent mode. You can therefore, configure 14 icons to suit your needs/interests.

Browser is superb. It’s a port of webkit and displays websites as-they-are on a wifi connection. On normal connections (such as GPRS), the browser s/w tries to tone down the site so that the site is usable. There are zoom features available too 🙂 (please don’t compare with an iPhone here). It has an inbuilt RSS reader which sucks. Supports an unlimited number of contact entries. The phone’s 2.0 megapixel camera is pretty good. It doesn’t have flash, but it still does a decent job in fairly lit places. On open sunlight, the picture clarity is too good.

It has a decent music player. But considering the fact that it runs Symbian, there are tons n tons of music software available.

However, there are a few features that I miss from this E51. These small features are available on almost all Sony Ericsson phones.

1. Intellisense support when typing messages/emails. I’m not kidding. When you switch on to T9 mode and start typing, a small menu pops up – right next to the cursor - with possible words, on K300i. You can select whichever word you want.
2. New Paragraphs. Opening up new paragraphs in my K300i was a breeze. Not possible in E51.
3. When you receive a call, K300i shows a small icon. That icon denotes the number-type. E.g. You have stored 3 numbers for a contact (home, business & mobile). When the caller calls from a mobile, a small mobile icon is shown. The same is applicable with SMS also. But such a number categorisation is not visible at first sight on this E51. Miss this feature very much. Deciding the type of number from the call is not fun because in most cases, we don’t remember the number at all.

One huge advantage of the phone is that, it’s very sleek and handy. Put it in your upocket and you will forget that the phone even exists. For all the bells and whistles, the phone is slightly on the heavier side. But its ok, considering the fact that it has a whole lot of features. Loud speaker clarity is very good. Calendar is on the nicer side. The best part of calendar is that, if you place something on the todo list and don’t get it done, it screams on the standby, making you feel very guilty … heheh!

It comes with a very powerful 369Mhz, ARM 11 CPU, 96 MB of SDRAM and built-in 130 MB of storage. Supports micro-sd based memory cards upto 4GB. Heap size is unlimited, which means, apps can use any amount of memory, only limited by the device specs. Java ME JAR files can also be of unlimited size. It supports HSDPA (High Speed Downlink Packet Access), which is all set to invade GSM in less than a couple of years.

All-in-all, it’s a very nice package and comes at a very low rate compared to all other phones having these features. Go, drool over the specs :D and let me know if you want any clarifications on any of the features.

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