It's a relatively affordable piece of gadget that caught my attention a few weeks back. Just 9,500 Baht (about $390). On top of my fascination with this phone, the Motorola Maxx that I got for free from Globe is now horribly defaced- its matte finish peeling off like bad sunburn-and this provided one more reason to buy my new phone. My Motorola's still working 100% though, withstanding the frequent drops it received in my hands. It's still very reliable and right now I'm using it for my Globe SIM card, which is on roaming.
If you haven't heard or seen this Nokia E51 yet, give yourself a good conk in the head. It's a great piece of device with so many features packed in a small, slim package. Too good to be true, but here it is.
The foremost reason that I liked this phone is because it supports both Blackberry and Mail for Exchange. Yes, it does! I don't currently have a Blackberry account (although contemplating on getting one because it's quite cheap in Thailand), but I do use Mail for Exchange (MFE). MFE is Nokia's proprietary application that works like Microsoft Mobile's Activesync. Basically, the phone synchronizes emails, contacts and calendar information with a Microsoft Exchange server account, which you can get for free at www.mail2web.com. The best thing about it is it supports "Push mail", a technology which works in the same way as Blackberry. Your emails get "pushed" into your phone as soon as they arrive without a need to manually synch or set a synch schedule every "xx" minutes.
Speaking as a true-blue overseas worker (but alas without the standard attire consisting of a khaki jacket, maong jeans and a full-rim moustache), I get the occasional pangs of homesickness especially when friends and family don't call or send me SMS as often as I want them to. Now since most of them have access to email from their workplaces anyway, with Push Email I can easily receive emails in my phone as quickly and effortlessly as a standard SMS, and send replies just as easily.
And it's quite affordable too, at least here in Thailand it is. An all day email connectivity translates to just more or less 30 minutes of actual download time consumed in a day- and roughly about 200 baht per month. A personal Blackberry account on the other hand costs 950 baht- but on top of that you get an unlimited Internet access (Edge-class) and some free voice calls and SMS, so it's a matter of what works for you.
The downside to using Push Email is it really eats up a lot of battery power, leaving the battery drained in two days tops. But that is an acceptable tradeoff to getting "connected with your loved ones 24/7" (insert snicker here).
Aside from the Push Email feature, this phone is also Wi-fi capable. How cool is that? I have wi-fi in my apartment so this is really useful. I remember years back when I got my first GPRS phone... on some days I'd be up all night downloading useless stuff and browsing the mobile web. Ah, those were the days.
If you noticed, the phone model doesn't start with an "N", as in N95 or whatnot. That's because it belongs to the E-series catalogue, Nokia's phone marketed towards the business segment. The N-series are mostly feature phones that dwell much on face value, music-playing capability and camera functions, but all these at the expense of operating systems that respond slowly to key presses and that are very prone to freezes or hangs. The E-series phones, on the other hand, sport just a decent enough camera and simple music player application, but are really heavy on business-intensive technology. You get reliable phones that are less (if at all) buggy in general, and Nokia store reps would attest to this. Ssh, it's a secret.
I have really graduated from all those fancy phones and just really need a good smartphone, which is what the E51 is.
This phone also supports Instant Messaging and VOIP calls. Imagine? These days I am usually online on Yahoo Messenger on my phone for hours (they disabled YM at work, see). The cool thing about its YM support is that you can have it run in the background while you put the phone on standby mode, or while you use another application. When you get a new message, you get an alert so you can easily get back to chatting. In that sense it can really replace the PC. As for VOIP, I haven't really used it yet but it's great knowing the option is there. VOIP is not very cheap when calling mobiles in the Philippines, blame it on our telcos that charge too much international connectivity fees.
Aside from the features I have already mentioned, there's a lot more that this phone offers:
- it is 3G/HSDPA-capable (sadly, this technology is yet to be made available in Thailand)
- it has an HMTL (not mobile internet or WAP) browser, so you will see the pages as you would on your PC - including mouse pointer, popups, You-tube video support and all
- did I say already it has Wi-fi?
- blinking LED light alert for unread emails, missed calls, etc.
- built-in text to speech feature that allows you to hear your messages aloud instead of reading them yourself
- it has a Microsoft Office reader - Word, Powerpoint and Excel! And PDF too.
- it can handle ZIP files
- it has Nokia Maps application! It doesn't have it own GPS module but instead uses the internet to download maps to the phone. I can see my street!
- while it doesn't have its own GPS module, it is compatible with separately bought GPS modules that you can carry around in your person if you really need it. Just connect it via Bluetooth
- it has Widsets application, which is like an RSS reader
- it has a dedicated Microsoft Hotmail/MSN chat application
- 2 megapixel camera (not the best around but enough to take a quick photo of Britney Spears when she unexpectedly turns up in your neighborhood barbero and demands to have her head shaved again)
- it has an FM radio
- it is very slim and can be easily slipped into the pocket of my pants- which is important because if the phone's bulky like my previous O2 PDAs, I will JUST LEAVE IT IN A TAXI CAB.
So there you go. If you're thinking of getting a very good phone that is functional, utilitarian and user-friendly, get the E51.
