From a design point of view it’s marketed as a low cost business phone and is finished in silver with a touch of black to the sides. If it was a model it would also be classed as size zero due to its ultra thin profile which makes it handy to carry around.

The size does have one draw back however as it accommodates a tiny screen (though 240 x 320) which makes viewing content such as videos and webpages more of a challenge - but you do get a virtual mouse pointer on-screen which makes it pretty easier to select content. The keypad and small joystick are also small but have a reassuring click - though heavy to press.

Our review unit came with the camera option which houses a 1.3MP camera using a simple point and click system that you need to hold still on after a shot has been taken - otherwise your images come out blured. The 1280 x 960 images did look ok when viewed on our PC but this camera is very basic indeed.

What makes the Nokia E50 so appealing is with its pre-installed software bundle, you get document viewers for reading Office programs, a zip program, Adobe reader and the standard PIM style apps (notes, calendar for example) and media players to name but a few. There is also a lot of text to speech software which benefit those with hard of sight. You also have the excellent Nokia PC suite for managing content on your Phone.

With the media side of things music played through the internal speaker was just about expectable - but is nothing to shout home about - but videos sounded fine.

The 235mz arm CPU on the whole was more than adequate to cope with everything we could throw at it but we did find it sluggish at times whilst it tried to acess certain features - such as switching to video mode from camera - but with the new firmware update this cures these types of problems and adds an extra 1.5mb free memory space to an already useful 60Mb +.

On the subject of memory, microSD expansion cards are easier to access compared to most phones due to the slot being located underneath the battery cover to the side.

Battery performance was not bad either with a 970mAh Lithium-Ion battery which can be upgraded to an 1150 at an additional cost of course. On paper the E50 provides 215 hours standby and nearly 7 hours of talk time.

Connectivity wise you won’t find 3G support, but you do get Quad-Band GSM/Edge/GPRS support and it even includes Blackberry email connectivity which is impressive for the phones price.

Phone reception was slightly erratic at times - with both O2 and our Orange sim - but this did not stop the call quality from being good, as overall it was fairly clear both inside and out.