Smartphones have made major progress in recent years, but for some businesses that simply raises more and more concerns about security.

With an ever-increasing array of connectivity options, including Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, mobile phones are becoming more at-risk of external attacks, and for the biggest businesses that means it’s harder to protect data.

It is perhaps little wonder, then, that there is still significant demand from businesses looking for people to sell used Nokia E5 phones to them.

This model dates back to late 2010, but still provides many of the fundamental features needed by businesses, without many of the major distractions that are inherent in more modern-day smartphones.

Smartphone by nature

The Nokia E5 is most definitely a smartphone, with the distinctive ‘candybar’ shape that is common to almost all recent handsets launched into the market.

With Wi-Fi support and a five-megapixel camera, it has the basic characteristics that would be expected of any half-decent phone these days.

Unlike many recent smartphones, though, the E5 has a full button-based keyboard, rather than a ‘virtual’ one that simply appears on the touchscreen.

While this commitment to actual ‘keys’ on their keyboards may have cost Nokia dearly in terms of market share during the early days of smartphones, many people still embrace the prospect of having a real button to press in order to type each letter, and the E5’s full QWERTY keyboard has plenty to offer for business users.

Going to work

Putting the E5 to work is easy enough, with QuickOffice document editing support that is suitable for basic word processing tasks and other such office work.

Email support comes via Mail for Exchange, along with IBM Lotus Notes support and several instant messaging platforms, including the former Windows Live Messenger, Skype, Google Talk and Yahoo! Messenger.

Navigation features including GPS and support for both Ovi and Nokia Maps make the model a compelling prospect for anyone who spends a lot of their time on the move.

Why so popular?

The Nokia E5 has been around for a while by smartphone standards and, while its basic functionality covers all of the most common areas of demand, it’s a handset that remains fairly free from frills and frivolity.

But it is for this reason that the E5 has remained so popular as the years have gone by: no-nonsense business-appropriate functionality, without time-wasting distractions, all of which makes it a handset that gets the job done, but not one the owner is likely to take home with them unnecessarily.

This is a phone that keeps work and personal life separate, reducing the risk of a data leak or, potentially worse still, of being dropped into a pint glass on a Friday night.

For businesses that want to provide smartphones to their employees, without taking a productivity hit, it remains a clear front-runner, and is likely to do so for several more years to come.

Article by Alisa Martin.