Review: Nokia E50 mobile phone

We were thrilled when we got this phone into the office. It's in a journalist's nature to want to play with gadgets galore, but sometimes we lust after a phone that does one thing really well: make phone calls.

We hoped it would be the kind of phone we'd want to brag about because it's so basic; it has no camera, no qwerty keyboard, no 3G and only a basic array of applications. There's support for push email, but you must have your own Microsoft Exchange server (and if you don't know what that is, it's unlikely you've got one).

The E50 will appeal to those needing ultimate travel-ability since it is a quad-band phone for use around the world and has good battery life; Nokia quotes battery life of up to 9 days standby and up to 6.8 hours talk time. This is exaggerated, but we still got a whole working week out of the phone on standby.

However, things soon turn a bit sour. Although the phone is basic, at 104g it's certainly not light. Furthermore, the keys aren't particularly comfortable to use and, since the phone is top heavy, it's not easy to text with. In fact, we found the phone's navigation in general was pretty poor, which is unusual for a Nokia.

There is 70MB of internal storage available, along with a mini-SD slot to add more memory, but we're not sure what you'd use it for since you can't edit documents. Nokia suggests you use the 70MB to store mp3s, but there's no 3.5mm jack to plug in your headphones. In fact there's not even a 2.5mm jack, so you'd have to use an unwieldy Nokia adapter (sold separately) to use stereo headphones.

From a purely aesthetic point of view, the E50 looks very bland. It also didn't take long for the aluminium battery cover to start garnering its first scratches, either. And while the 240x320 resolution of the display is actually very good (higher than the excellent Palm v750), the 2in screen is too small to take advantage of this.

Overall we were left disappointed with the Nokia E50. We liked the simple nature of the phone, and both call clarity and the speakerphone were excellent, but it shouldn't be so heavy. And if Nokia is promoting it as an mp3 player, it should surely have a 3.5mm headphone socket to take advantage of the 70MB internal memory, or at least a set of stereo headphones included instead of the single earpiece hands-free kit.

The E50 is currently exclusive to T-mobile and in decrypting how much it costs, we ascertained on Flext20 (£15.00 for 18 months), it is £89 cheaper than the excellent Blackberry Pearl.

Also consider:
Palm v750
An excellent alternative to the Blackberry

Blackberry Pearl 8100
The corporate mobile email machine gets a streetwise makeover

All mobile phone reviews

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