Nokia’s E51 handset is aimed squarely at business users, offering email access and advanced capabilities such as IP telephony over Wi-Fi, yet delivers this in a slimline and unobtrusive design in keeping with Nokia’s traditional candybar phone products. However, we were unable to test the E51’s IP telephony functions, so firms interested in this need to carefully evaluate that it works with their infrastructure.

Available since October 2007, the E51 blends smartphone features with those of a standard handset. It runs Nokia’s S60 3rd Edition SP1 user environment atop the Symbian OS 9.2 platform, and supports high-speed HSDPA 3G networks and 802.11g Wi-Fi capability, as well as quad-band GSM for voice calls.

Despite this, it weighs just 100g, so can easily be slipped into a pocket, and apart from its 2in colour display it could be just a conventional phone.

The design of the phone should make the E51 appeal to firms looking for a handset to standardise on for mobile workers, especially organisations considering IP telephony for calls made on-campus in the future. In this respect, the E51 is similar to HP’s iPaq 514 Voice Messenger, which we tested last year.

As part of Nokia’s corporate E series, the E51 has much in common with other phones in the range, such as the E61. But while several of these have a qwerty keyboard, the E51 instead has a standard numeric keypad, making it less suitable for heavy email and messaging use, and more of a voice-focused device.

We found the E51 easy to use, at least when accessing most features that workers will typically need on a regular basis. Configuring the device is a different matter however, with a host of different settings that need entering in numerous places in the menu for features such as Wi-Fi, email and internet telephony. Fortunately, Nokia enables IT managers to remotely provision most of these settings for employees using its Intellisync Device Management tool.

For example, we found it a chore to set up the E51 to send and receive email, largely because the numeric keypad makes it a long-winded process to key in email addresses. In fairness to Nokia, the E51 comes with a setup wizard that automatically discovered most settings after we filled in our email address, but HP’s iPaq 514 ships with a Windows configuration tool that let us enter settings on a PC, then transfer them over via a USB connection. Out of the box, the E51 supports Microsoft’s ActiveSync protocol for getting push email from Exchange servers, plus Imap and POP3 for other mail accounts.

We experienced some difficulties with the E51’s Wi-Fi interface, and found that the phone would regularly lose its connection with our test wireless access point. This is a problem we have previously encountered with other Nokia handsets, but in this case it was solved by switching to a different access point that was not hidden. We would advise IT departments interested in the E51 for this feature to test it with their wireless infrastructure before deployment.

Users can connect to a Wi-Fi network relatively easily by scanning with a tool provided on the home screen. If it finds a previously defined access point, the user can proceed directly to browsing the web using that connection; otherwise it will prompt for the access point’s password, and then automatically add it to the access point list. Users can also manually add access points using the Settings tool.

Aside from the phone’s standard voice call features, the E51 also supports IP telephony using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), enabling calls to be made over Wi-Fi. This can be configured so that the phone automatically makes a voice-over-IP call whenever a Wi-Fi connection is available, or to let staff choose which transport to use.

Sadly, we were unable to test IP telephony on the E51 as we could not get this feature operating in the time available for testing, even with assistance from Nokia. The feature requires a SIP profile to be created to hook up with a PBX or server providing voice services, and this needs a long list of parameters, much more
than with HP’s iPaq 514, for example, which we were able to make IP calls on.

However, our review unit featured a number of tools that are also likely to prove beneficial to enterprise users. The most notable is Team Suite, a collaboration tool that lets the user maintain a list of colleagues, and set up a conference call with several or all of them at once, plus send messages to them. There is also a Search tool akin to Google’s desktop search that enables you to quickly find information in contacts, notes, calendar entries, appointments and emails on the phone.

Nokia also ships the Quickoffice mobile productivity suite that supports Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint document formats. The version included on the E51 only supports viewing of files, but users can purchase and download an upgrade to full editing capability. Other applications include Nokia Maps, which can be used for navigation when combined with a Bluetooth GPS receiver, and various media players.

The screen of the E51 reveals that this is not just a standard handset, and fits a 240x320 display into its 2in area. We found this bright and sharp, making it easy to read. Although small, it gives a reasonable experience when using the Nokia web browser to view pages. The browser itself renders web pages very well for a mobile product, but we found we had to pan and zoom a great deal.

In our tests, we found web pages loaded quickly when we had a connection to a 3G data network or a Wi-Fi access point, but this slowed considerably if a standard GPRS connection was the only one available, which will be the situation for many users away from metropolitan areas.

Our review handset itself was stylish in design, with a metallic trim and a slide-off metal cover for the battery compartment at the rear. This is also where the SIM card slot and a slot for MicroSD Flash cards are found. The phone also boasts a 2 megapixel digital camera, and ships with a USB PC sync cable and wired headset for making calls.

Battery life is quoted at up to 4.4 hours of talk time, and up to 13 days on standby.