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Review: Nokia E50 light business phoneBy Sindre Lia, Thursday 7 September 2006
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Nokia E50
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Nokia E50
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Nokia E50
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Nokia E50
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The Nokia E50 aims to help you work smarter, yet doesn't strike us as the most obvious business phone out there; Sindre Lia looks under its hood to find out.

Review summary of the Nokia E50:
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Nokia E50 The Nokia E50 is primarily an excellent calling and light-messaging phone, and should be considered by those who fancy compact form factor and great battery life over advanced e-mail and productivity capabilities. That said, the E50 also shines with an excellent high-resolution screen and a powerful Internet browser capable of loading full-version Web sites. Release: September 2006. Price: $350.
Pros: Solid keypad and joystick; compact form factor; excellent screen; powerful browser; great battery life
Cons: Lacks 3G capabilities; a minimum of productivity and advanced e-mail capabilities; mediocre multimedia features
Poor
Mediocre
Good
Very good
90%
EXCELLENT
Full review of the Nokia E50:
Calling - Excellent

Sporting quad-band GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz and EDGE, the Nokia E50 provides superb call and signal reception quality. The contacts list offers responsive while-typing contact lookup, while voice dialing and conference calling (up to 6 participants) are also duly supported. The battery life of the E50 also proved to be impressive; we measured a talk time of 5 hours and a standby time of 6 days.

Messaging - Excellent

The combination of a bright high-resolution screen and a solid casing and keypad made for comfortable message typing and reading. The messaging management of the E50 is top-notch, and with 70 MB of internal memory there's room for plenty of messages. Sadly, support for advanced business e-mail is quite limited out-of-box, but at least a USB cable is bundled. The E50 also features a durable, user-friendly five-way joystick.

Best of the rest

As many recent Nokia phones, the E50 boasts a powerful Internet browser capable of loading full-version Web sites (such as lengthy New York Times home page) with ease. The lack of 3G, however, means there's not much in the way of downloadable music or TV streaming. As for other features, the E50 includes Microsoft Office and PDF viewers which might come in handy if e-mail attachments are received, but we were more impressed by the devices powerful searching capabilities.

In the Media folder, the combination of RealPlayer, Flash Player and Music player raised our hopes for great multimedia features, although we again were disappointed by the lack of speedy video and audio streaming. However, a well-integrated 1.3-megapixel camera improves the overall multimedia impression slightly, especially thanks to its decent image quality and a nice "Images left" feature on-screen in the viewfinder.

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Score: 78% When: September 2005 Worth: $200 - $500 Carrier: Cingular

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Price and availability

Best
Name Score Price Carrier
C
Shure se530PTH 94% $550
Shure se420 90% $400
Sony PlayStation Portable 87% $250
Apple iPod 80GB 86% $250
Archos AV700 85% $475
Creative Zen Vision 85% $400
Olympus SP-560UZ 85% $350
Nokia N95 8GB NAM 85% $650 Unlocked
Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX55 84% $265
Sennheiser HD650 84% $599
Click here to see full and advanced chart »
 
 
 
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