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Nokia E50 is the latest model of the Nokia E-series, which is the business-oriented line of the biggest mobile phones manufacturer.

Unlike the E61 and E70, the E50 has neither a QWERTY keyboard, nor 16 million color display, but it’s the slimmest smartphone produced by Nokia up to now with its 15.5 mm thickness and even being 11 mm thick at the keypad, which is the reason for the good weight distribution so that the phone feels solid in the hand.

phoneArena reviewed this phone and here are their impressions: Design-wise the phone is relatively narrow and thus resembles the legendary 6310 which was the best business phone back then, and that’s exactly what Nokia E50 is aiming at as the emphasis is laid on design, good phonebook and applications like Office, PDF Reader, Text to Speech and User-independent Voice Recognition.

E50 is a phone running on Symbian Operating System with Series 60 interface. The version of the interface is v.9.1, which is the latest one up to now – that’s why it’s similar with other phones by the manufacturer, like the E70 and N80 for example. S60 is the most used interface for Symbian, and Nokia has a lot of models using it, while it’s also used by other manufacturers (Siemens, Samsung, Sendo). Unlike the UIQ interface, it still has no touch display support which makes it more similar to WM Smartphones than Pocket PCs.

Besides the business functions the E50 also features the standard multimedia capabilities offered by a Series 60 phone – a camera and music/video player. The camera resolution is only 1.3 megapixels, which is poor according to the current standards as there are already phones with 3-megapixel cameras on the market. But it is not intended to be a key feature of the E50, as the phone even has a version without a camera at all. The camera's interface does not even take up the whole display and the Viewfinder only occupies half of it, while the options available are color effects, white balance and night mode, which almost useless.

As far as picture quality is concerned, the E50 camera definitely can not replace your digital camera and the image quality is a standard one compared to other phones with 1.3-megapixel camera – in order to get the best out of the camera you need a lot of light, but this may also cause overexposure and purple fringing of large areas of the picture. The noise levels are too high when the lighting conditions are not good enough and when taking pictures indoors, it is almost impossible to make them look normal. There’s no flash to help you out in dark conditions and the night mode is useless although the slightly better results.

The conclusion is that Nokia E50 combines high functionality and stylish design with a very good size for a smartphone, but a uncomfortable to use keypad and slow navigation through the menus, which affects the usage of the phone as a whole. In order to make the phone suitable for business users, Nokia has decided to use a powerful battery, a large and bright display and metal parts, but the sound quality and the speed performance are something to complain about – and these are things very important to the business user.

Read full review on phoneArena.