Review: Nokia adds VoIP to business handset
Date : 01 20 2008 Category : Technology
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Daniel Robinson, IT Week, Monday 21 January 2008 at 00:00:00
The Nokia E51 fits the business essentials into a slim handset with IP telephony support
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....
