Nokia announced a new enterprise device this week, adding an enhanced candy-bar style device to the bottom end of its E series. The new E51 is, as the nomenclature suggests, an enhancement to the bottom-of-the-range E50, adding HSDPA and WiFi connectivity as well as improved usability features.
The E51 is a nice device, good-looking, and easy to understand and use. That said it's not mould-shattering or category-creating. Nokia has added more entertainment functionality to what is avowedly an enterprise device, including an FM radio, a better (2-megapixel) camera, and an MP3 player. It says that this is because it recognises that the devices are used for leisure as well as work - a view that may not receive the warmest of receptions inside the CIO's office.
Perhaps the CIO can take heart from some of the E51's limitations. Unlike the more recent entertainment-friendly Blackberry devices it can't be used with a standard 3.5mm stereo headphone jack, so the user needs one of those annoying little adaptors that no shops seem to stock. That should stop them listening to music in the company's time, and on the company's phone. The device has a USB socket, but doesn't do USB charging - so that's another charger to take on trips.
On the more positive side, Nokia has made some small but worthwhile additions to the user interface. The home screen concept, customisable by the user, replaces the bloated application grid view as the jumping-off point for the most used applications. Four buttons around the central selection key are pre-configured for home, contacts, calendar and contacts, and a sustained press creates a new entry in each of these categories. Since this is what users want to do most of the time, that's less grubbing around in multi-layered menus.
Nokia also took the opportunity to share some of its other insights about the enterprise mobility market. It remains upbeat about the prospects for dual mode FMC, and will next month be releasing new versions of its Intellisync Call Connect Client to enable interworking with both Cisco and Alcatel-Lucent IP-PBXs. Neither supports the holy grail of seamless in-call handover between WiFi and cellular, but Nokia continues to work towards both a standards-based approach and a proprietary solution. It admits that dual mode FMC is still in the pilot phase, but continues to believe there is a powerful logic that will eventually make it attractive to enterprises.
Almost as an aside, Nokia also admitted that the raison d'etre of its soon-to-be-reorganised enterprise mobility division was a conviction that it was possible to approach enterprises independently of the mobile network operator - and that this conviction has turned out to be wrong.