If you are an executive in the marker for a suitable call phone, Nokia’s E serise offers the best bang for the buck. the Nokia E51 is the latest from the venerable E serise, and an apt successor to the hugely popular E50 model, which it will eventually replace. The E51 brings in new features at a price that’s hard to beat. The keypad is completely revised, with dedicated keys for Contacts, Calendar, E-mail and Home. The softmenu keys, however, are too small for comfort. The rest of the keypad is a delight good tactile feedback, and key spacing is immaculate. The rebberised keys for volume up / down, push-to-talk and power are head to operate,though.
The E51 feels peppy-it uses the processor as on the flagship N95. With 130 MB of memory on board, you can do lot of multitasking without the phone getting sluggish, and the memory can be expanded to 4 GBvia the microSD slot (a 512 MB card comes bundled). The E51 runs on Symbian OS Series 60, and crams in lot of features besides the standard set. Most of these will go down well with executives-for example, the Advance call manager

lets you manage incoming and outgoing calls efficiently. In addition, WorldMate, an application for frequent fliers, comes bundled. The E51 is a 3G, quad-band phone with HSDPA, Wi-Fi (820.11g) Bluetooth, Micro USB and an infrared port. There’s a switch to turn bluetooth on and off on the main keypad. Multimedia features include a good MP3 player, a 2MP camera with still and video shooting, and FM radio.
Signal reception is good, as is voice clarity. Internet browsing speeds are faster then with the E50 or E61, thanks to the revised Web browser. The camera is above average, but loses performance in low- light conditions, with little or no echo on the recipient’s side. We got around three days of battery life with nominal usage and a terrific seven days of standby time. The Nokia E5 retails at $375 ; it is, we think, a must- buy.

Micro-SD card
Micro SD memory
Memory Stick Micro
M2 memory
M2 card

Asus has brought up their full line-up of PDA phones and the P525 is a PDA with a number pad, sometimes of a rarity. Its a touch screen running Windows Mobile 5 and the charcoal grey that made the P525 such a good looker makes another appearance. The P525 is a beautiful beast, all smokey gray with chrome buttons down the side panel in sharp contrast. We also liked the screen-crisp, clear and good contrast, visible even in direct sunlight.
The number keys look like sculpted buttons that have been integrated into the body. They give just the right amount of feedback when used, and never feel tacky.We don’t like the joystick though; its too small and smooth and theres insufficient tactile feedback. We also didn’t like the fact that the joysctick’s in between the number keys 2 and 5. this affects access to the number 2.
Voice commander makes another appearance, a really excellent piece of code, this-that allows you to do so much more with the voice commands. The excellent business card scanner is also preinstalled. Theres also a password protected security application called My Secrets that allows you to protect your files by encrypting them. All the usual Windows Mobile applications are present as well.
There is a dedicated button for the camera, which is surprisingly good for a PDA. The volume button is very ergonomic, as is the hold button which prevents keypad, button and screen use.
While the loud speaker offers decent volume, we lament the volume levels on the hands free kit, its just too low, be it music or a voice call. While on the topic of calls, signal quality could have been better, a parent weakness of most of the PDAs. If you need a good phone, please look elsewhere.
Where the P525 scores is in PDA functionality (even though it forgoes a QWERTY keypad), looks nobody will disagree here and, of course, the software package that improves productivity by quite an extent. At $500 the ASUS P525 is a good PDA, but a strictly avarage phone. Its flashy for sure, and will draw glances anywhere. You’ll have to decide what is more important to you - PDA features or just a Mobile Phone.

The Samsung F700 is a touch screen/sensitive phone with a QWERTY keyboard which can slide out when tilting the phone counter-clockwise. If you feel that you don’t want to use the QWERTY keyboard you can use the touch screen instead. Double clicking on a text area will bring up a virtual keyboard which includes T9 support and is layed out exactly the same as previous Samsung phones. Problem with using this is that to start off with you will find yourself touching extra characters by mistake till you get used to it. At first texting with the QWERTY keyboard takes longer than on a normal device but once your used to it you wont be going back to the normal way of writing things.
There are cameras situated on both sides of the phone to allow for 3G video calls, no protective slide protecting the lenses

though. The main camera is a 3.15 MP camera that produces images up to a resolution of 2048×1536 pixels and next to it you will find a flash. The camera on the front of the device is a bog standard VGA camera with no flash.
On the front of the device there is only one button which when pressed brings up your shortcuts. On the right hand side of the device you will find volume controls, camera button and a slidey type button that is used to lock the keypad. On top of the device there is the power button and flap which when pulled to the side will reveal the power socket and socket for hands free/headphones. The device can support memory cards which are located under the back cover along with battery and sim card. With my phone i was given an additional back plate so you may also get this if you purchase your phone. My back plate hasnt scratched up yet so i have not yet to use it. The speakers and mic are hidden at the top and bottom of the front of the phone respectively but i reckon these will gather a lot of dust and cleaning them could be hard unless you have some compressed air to clean them out once in a while.
The main menu is shown as a 3 x 4 grid with a cross hair which you can drag around to get to the icon you wish to select. Hovering over icons displays the name of the icon making it easy to find the place you want to get to. Unfortunately there are no additional themes/skins with this phone and your stuck with the dark background with light text.
The touch screen itself is pretty responsive but there has been times where i’ve had to click a number of times to get it doing what i want it to do. I put this down to my finger not being in the right place rather than the phone not registering something is being pressed. Samsung has added a nice feature where the phone vibrates when you click on things and the level of vibration can be changed or turned off completely. This is called VibeTonz Technology if you wanted to search for it for more info. Continue reading »