Nokia E 75

If we can think of one reason to take being told "to mind your own business" with a smile it would be the Nokia Eseries. A household name for enterprise users, it's hardly a surprise that each E-series update is greeted with plenty of excitement. The Nokia E75 is no exception, even if it doesn't really put anything new on the table.

The side-sliding QWERTY form factor lands on Symbian turf following a reasonably successful spell on the WinMo side of the yard.

The major novelty of the Nokia E75 is the form factor and we're about to see if this is enough for it to carve a niche out for itself in a crowded market.

There's no denying that if a side-sliding QWERTY is good enough for a teenage-targeted music phone (the Nokia 5730 XpressMusic), it must be more than at home in a full-featured business phone. Welcome to the Nokia E75.

Key features 2.4" 16M-color TFT display of QVGA resolution Four-row side-slide QWERTY keyboard Quad-band GSM and tri-band 3G (with HSDPA) support Symbian OS with S60 3.2 UI 369 MHz ARM11 CPU 3.5mm standard audio jack microSD card slot, 4GB microSD card prebundled 3.2 megapixel auto focus camera with a dedicated shutter key, geotagging and VGA@30fps video recording Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g with UPnP technology Built-in GPS receiver and Nokia Maps with 3 months of free voice-assisted navigation USB and stereo Bluetooth (A2DP) connectivity Steel battery cover FM radio with RDS Remote Wipe functionality Carrier-independent VoIP support Office document editor User-friendly Mode Switch for toggling two homescreen setups Smart dialing

Even if we leave aside the scores of competing business handsets, the Nokia E75 still faces quite stiff competition from within the E-series range itself. It's unreasonably close to the E90 as far as pricing is concerned and is quite uncomfortably cloning most of Nokia E71 functionality. The side-sliding QWERTY keyboard and FP2 are pretty much all the E75 has over the E71.

It's more like an alternative we're talking here rather than a substantial upgrade. Truth be told, we were pretty impressed with the Nokia E71 and if the E75 matches its performance then there will be no reason to grumble.

Design and construction The only functional element at the top is the 3.5mm standard audio jack and that's another point in favor over the E71. It's not sealed for protection but it is comfortably placed.

As we mentioned, the back of the handset has a soft spot in our hearts. We do appreciate the steel battery cover and the opaque plastic around it. Certainly one of the best looking backs in the industry, it makes the plain plastic front all the more inconsistent.

As far as functional elements are concerned, we find the loudspeaker grill and the 3 megapixel camera lens here. Next to the lens are the LED flash and a small self-portrait mirror.

Releasing the battery cover is sweet and easy: it pops up upon sliding the latch at the bottom. Underneath lies a 1000 mAh Li-Ion BL-4U unit.

We do find that to be one of the handset's shortcomings as the E71 was equipped with a way more powerful 1500 mAh battery. There was just no stopping the E71, and its battery life extends way beyond its side-sliding sibling.

With the 1000 mAh extensive use of features like Wi-Fi and GPS on top of a few calls a day and you will need to recharge in the evening.

In terms of design, the Nokia E75 is defined by the stark contrast between the fingerprint-prone glossy front and the state of the art rear panel. Still we have to admit that the handset handles pretty nicely, save for the tiny controls clustered around the D-pad. The build is rock solid.

Display is pretty good The Nokia E75 display has the company's trademark high image quality. The days when Nokia was way ahead of the pack in terms of screen quality are now gone but that's due to the competition finally turning their attention to the matter, and not because Nokia have started falling behind. Anyways, even if that's true now, you can always trust a Nokia handset to have a vibrant display and great sunlight legibility.

Brightness levels are good and contrast is pretty decent, but admittedly not as good as the iPhone 3G or the recently reviewed BlackBerry handsets. In terms of size, the 2.4" screen of the E75 is acceptable given the compact dimensions of the handset while QVGA is still the rule outside the touchscreen realm. As we already said however, a larger display (at least a 2.6-incher) would have been much appreciated.

Sunlight legibility is not an issue on the E75. Even if the colors get washed out, the display remains perfectly visible even on the brightest of days.

QWERTY keyboard is splendid, numberpad not so much The alphanumeric keypad of the Nokia E75 certainly has its issues with the keys being a bit too thin for our liking. What you have on the E75 is actually four thin plastic plates rather than distinct buttons. Tactility is certainly compromised and press feedback is inadequate. The bottom row of keys is particularly adversely affected by these issues and the narrowness means your fingers will often slide off.

Symbian S60 UI now comes with Feature Pack 2 Nokia E75 runs on Symbian 9.3 OS with the Series60 3rd Edition user interface. It has Feature Pack 2, unlike the Nokia E71 which only had the major features of Feature Pack 2 ported for the FP1. Frankly speaking, in normal use you won't find much difference between the two.

The Nokia E75 is powered by a 369 MHz CPU. In Symbian smartphone terms this means that navigating the menus is pretty fast with instant response to key presses and no delays whatsoever.

The E75 comes with the new S60 icons, similar to the one found on the 5th edition and brings some new accelerometer-based functionality. This includes automatic rotation of the display plus silencing calls and snoozing the alarm by flipping your phone over or tapping the display. The extended number of settings for the slider is also a nice addition but that almost completes the list.

The phone's main menu has two view modes: a 4 x 3 grid of icons and a list. However with the E75 you cannot opt for having animated icons as with some other Nokia phones. This is probably just another way of reiterating the specific business focus of the phone. At least the font size is configurable depending on your preferences.

You can also switch between portrait and landscape orientation for every menu by either opening and closing the slider or by using the accelerometer. Please bear in mind that the accelerometer is disabled by default so you will have to turn it on from the setting menu in order to use it.

The circle next to the icon of a running application is a well known Symbian indication reminding users to quit unwanted applications that are still running in the background.

The active stand-by mode goes without saying on the Nokia E75. This is a convenient way to add shortcuts to all your favorite applications on the home screen. You can even assign shortcuts to websites of your choice for quicker access. In addition you can bring up to 14 different kinds of notifications starting from email boxes and voice mail through calendar and to-dos to Music player and FM radio currently running track. How many of those 14 get displayed is completely up to you.

Both of the one-touch keys (messaging and calendar) can be customized to access any feature (actually two per key) of choice. The two soft keys functions can also vary.

If for some reason the active stand-by mode isn't your cup of tea you can revert to the basic theme or switch to the new talking theme. The basic theme allows you to assign shortcuts to the directions of the D-pad while the talking theme…well, it talks. It brings four shortcuts to your homescreen and tells you what the currently selected one is. Once you enter any of the menus, it tells you which menu you have opened and sometimes gives you some extra useful information about it. For example, when you enter the clock application, it tells you the current time.

This talking theme is pretty comfortable for working with without looking at the phone. It might be a good idea to activate it when using the phone while driving for example and save yourself some needless distraction.

Another cool feature of ther recent E-series handsets allows you to toggle between two different phone setups. Each of them can be customized with its own theme and homescreen applications for maximum usability. In this way you can have both a leisure and a business profile and alternate between them with a single click.

The built-in memory is 85MB, which is a decent amount. The included 4GB microSD memory card comes in very handy for extending it, but even higher capacity cards are supported.

As we managed to confirm, Nokia E75 has no problem handling a 16GB microSD card, which is the largest currently available on the market. Accessing applications or any other files on the memory card is quick and you probably won't notice any difference compared to accessing ones in the phone memory.

As with any Symbian phone, there is a built-in voice recognition system. It is launched by the dedicated key on the side of the E75 and it does a good job, being fully speaker-independent and recognizing a very high percentage of the user commands.

And finally, there's a nice security feature from the E71 and E66 known as Remote Lock. It's not a new feature per se, but up until now it was usually reserved for corporate scenarios. Now it's available to everyone.

If your Nokia E75 gets stolen or lost, you simply send a coded SMS message to remotely lock the phone. After three unsuccessful attempts of to unlock it, it wipes itself clean of all personal or sensitive info. You might not get your Nokia E75 back, but at least nobody will get your personal data either.

The customization options for the user interface of the Nokia E75 are mainly restricted to its functionality out of the box. In stark contrast to the huge amount of customizable notifications, there are only two different visual themes preinstalled on the handset. So if you are into changing those icons and colors you will have to download new ones from the internet….but don't worry, there's plenty to choose from out there.

No changes in the phonebook The phonebook of the Nokia E75 hasn't evolved too much from the E71. It still does a tremendous job though, offering storage space for a virtually unlimited number of contacts and fields and all the available memory potentially usable for that purpose. We can't imagine anyone managing to fill that up. You are also treated to as many fields for each contact as you like and some other nice extras, so there's very little reason to complain.

Telephony has to be good With Nokia E75 you are extremely unlikely to experience any reception issues. Sound during calls is very clear and free of any interferences.

Nokia E75 features the really nice Smart dialing feature, which helps you quickly find a contact straight from the standby screen. All you need to do is type a few letters and all contacts with names (first or last) containing them get displayed. Working with both the keypad and the keyboard it is certainly the best way to access your contacts without even opening the phonebook.

Messaging got even better The E-series devices are mostly about messaging and connectivity so we are not surprised that they got this part right. What actually did surprise us is that they somehow managed to outdo the already excellent E71 email client. The full-fledged keyboard and the software support make for a great messenger. From a nice and intuitive editor to advanced predictive input and error correction - it's all there.

There are three message editors aboard: SMS and MMS share the first one, audio and e-mail. The SMS editor is the familiar application for all Symbian S60 smartphones. It has a counter of the characters left from the limit of 160. There is also an indicator in brackets showing the number of separate parts the message will be divided into for sending.

All quiet on the music front Full-featured music ability is not supposed to make or break a business device but the music player of the Nokia E75 is still pretty decent. That's hardly surprising considering how mature the Symbian S60 music player is, and it didn't cost Nokia anything to just put it in the E75.

The lack of dedicated music keys is easily overcome by the smooth D-pad control. There is a huge number of audio formats supported including MP3, AAC, eAAC+ and WMA. M3U playlists are also managed seamlessly and transferred files are added to the music library trouble-free by choosing the refresh option.

Video player The Nokia E75 features Real player for playing your video clips. The video player works in portrait or fullscreen landscape mode. The softkey functions are hidden in full screen so they don't get in the way, and they only pop up when a key is pressed.

The relatively big screen and the MP4 video clips support add up to a passable video watching experience but you will probably resort to another player anyway. The reason for this is quite simple - the E75 lacks DivX and XviD support out of the box. Luckily, finding applications for the S60 3.2 that support those codecs is a fairly easy task.

FM radio is also available The Nokia E75 sports stereo FM radio with RDS. Controlled with the same application as in other FP2 phones, it has several new settings over the E71 but, as you might have guessed, hardly anything revolutionary.

Upon starting, the app asks you where you are located in order to set up the proper frequencies for your area.

The FM radio can automatically scan and save the available stations in your area. Scanning for alternative frequencies when traveling can also be set to automatic.

Scandalously poor camera Having seen how bad the Nokia E71 camera was, we were hoping the E75 might have been in line for some kind of upgrade. However we were in for a major disappointment as the performance of the device was nothing short of disastrous (and this is a retail unit we're talking about).

It may sound decent on paper - 3 megapixel sensor with auto focus and LED flash - but the reality is completely different. In fact the LED flash is not much of an addition, as its effective reach is quite limited…yet that's the least of the issues with the camera.

First off, the lack of lens protection means that the glass above the camera lens will get scratched in no time. And, as we mentioned before, while the dedicated camera key seems like a welcome addition, its poor ergonomics and slow launch leave a bitter taste in the mouth.

The camera user interface is probably the only good part about the E75 snapper. Using our favorite tabbed interface, the camera offers extensive settings: from manual white balance and ISO sensitivity to exposure compensation, sharpness and contrast settings, as well as various effects which are labeled color tones.

Connectivity is the E75 element Putting the abysmal camera performance behind us, it's time to check out the connectivity options. This is a great chance for the messenger to repair its damaged reputation and it was certainly up to the challenge.

It is truly on fire where data transfer is in question, having it all: from the outdated Infrared through Bluetooth v2.0 and USB v2.0 to Wi-Fi and 3G. Furthermore, the 3G comes with HSDPA support for the fastest network data transfers.

A hot-swappable card slot is also on board. It might just be the quickest and most convenient way of transferring data.

We give an excellent mark to Nokia E75 on connectivity, just because we know no better.

Web browser is fine Browsing the internet on a Nokia smartphone is definitely a positive experience. The E75 is no exception with its excellent page rendering making most web pages look like they do on a desktop computer. We have to admit that a higher resolution would have allowed more content to fit on the screen, but maybe next time.

The virtual mouse cursor is easy to control and generally works great. The D-pad control is not as comfortable as Samsung's optical joystick or BlackBerry's trackball but still does the job.