the Nokia E50

The E50 is quad-band phone that attempts to provide PDA-style functionality with the small form factor and weight of a standard cell phone. Nokia has succeeded in doing this nicely, but they’ve had to make a few compromises along the way that I’ll discuss in greater detail in the review. The display is another of the big compromises that Nokia had to make. While the screen has an excellent resolution of 240 x 320, that resolution is crammed into a fairly small space. This has both positive and negative consequences. On the plus side the pixels are so small that they aren’t really discernable, thus making the things you see on the screen seem very smoothly rendered.



On the minus side the screen is difficult to see unless you have the eyes of an eagle, or you have to wear glasses to correct myopia. Those of you who wear glasses to see far away know that when they take their glasses off they can focus very close to objects and can see levels of detail that require a magnifying glass for others. The screen on the E50 uses fonts that are so tiny that being able to focus closely to the screen is needed to comfortably read them. This can seriously impact upon the usefulness of the device and I strongly recommend that you check this out to make sure you won’t have trouble reading the screen.



The 1.3 megapixel camera on the E50 is about mid-pack when it comes to quality. It fairs well against the 1.3 megapixel camera in my Motorola i580, but there are a few issues that make this camera less useful than the one on the Motorola phone. The first is a common fault with Nokia cameras, which is a high level of digital noise in low light conditions. More importantly however, this also applies to the darker regions of brightly-lit subjects, which makes it impossible to adjust the shadows and highlights using software such as Photoshop. Bringing up the shadows in an E50 photo only enhances the noise that’s already there and the results are disappointing to say the least.



You can expand the memory in the E50 by means of a MicroSD card. My only complaint about the placement of the card slot was that you had to take off the battery door to get at it. Fortunately you don’t really to need get at all that much at all, as the phone acts as a Mass Storage Device via USB. This means that if you plug it into a Windows XP computer the operating system will automatically see the phone as a hard drive without the need to install any drivers. However, the phone must go “offline” while such a connection is made.