After last year’s market hit, the Nokia E71, Nokia comes out with another E series smart phone, the Nokia E75 that is meant to exceed the first one’s huge sales. Furthermore, the Finnish giant stuffed it with a new and free service that will combine all known email ones into a single Inbox, thus increasing the phone’s productivity in terms of messaging. The inclusion of a built in email client, including corporate email, makes the E75 one of the most wanted business phones available in the market. Add to that an outstanding QWERTY keyboard which makes it even greater, but let’s see how it behaves in daily use, compared to its E71 predecessor.
Design
Even though Nokia E75 strongly resembles E71 in terms of technical features, its design is comparable with that of the E51’s. In fact, one can say that this is the E51’s successor, as they look much the same, except that the E75 is a little bit thicker, because of the QWERTY keyboard that has been attached to its back. At first glance, E75 may look as a standard candy-bar phone, as the keyboard doesn’t make it bulky at all. Measuring 111.8 x 50 x 14.4 mm and weighing 139g(including battery), Nokia E75 feels excellent in hand and fits perfectly in any pocket. The metallic back cover gives it an exquisite and stylish aura, which is a little bit faded by the cheap glossy plastic on the front part. This seems to be the same plastic as that of Nokia’s N96 and N78 smart phones, which means that it will probably be a fingerprint magnet.
The front part of the phone features a 2.4-inch display and an in-call speaker just above the screen. On both sides of the latter, you’ll notice an ambient light sensor and a secondary video-call camera. Below the screen, a very small numeric keypad has been placed. The keys are well defined, even when your fingers are wet or sweaty. Most of the time, your fingers will slip when you want to push the*, 0, or # buttons. The big D-pad controller seems very responsive and does a great job, but the keys around it are annoying for the user. Nokia E75 lacks a power button, so you’ll have to use the red Reject calls one. Still, you’ll have to be very careful, as the key is very responsive and pressing it twice in a row, by mistake, will basically power off your phone.
The right side of the slider features two volume keys and a Voice command one, but also a dedicated camera button. Fortunately, this one won’t start the camera, unless you press it for about four-five seconds. This is to prevent the accidental press of the button, while the phone is in the pocket. The left side of the phone features a microUSB port and a microSD slot, both covered by two rigid plastic stripes. The small charger port has been placed on the bottom of the phone, while on top a 3.5mm jack port comes as a wonderful surprise. The back of the phone is stainless steel plated, except the small upper and lower parts, which are made of a glossy, silver-colored plastic. The 3.2-Megapixel camera features a mirror for self portraits and an LED flash. Next to the camera, on the right part of the back cover, there’s a small loudspeaker.
The sliding mechanism seems pretty sturdy and not that loud. The actual QWERTY keyboard is one of the best on the market, as the keys are flat and very spacious. The responsiveness is excellent, while the backlighting is outstanding. This seems to be the strong point of the device, even though the numerical keypad is not that user-friendly. Overall, Nokia E75 features a pretty standard design for a bar handset, but manages to place itself in the “eye-catchy phones” category, thanks to the stainless steel casing and the extremely ergonomic form factor.
Processor and Memory
Nokia E75 is powered by a single ARM11 family processor, running at speeds of up to 369 MHz, which seems to be working greatly with this Symbian 3.2 platform. The CPU is one of the best that have been included in an E series device, so, obviously, you will barely notice any lags when browsing the menus or running more than one application in the background. Anyway, I suggest upgrading to the latest firmware, in case your phone features an older version.
The handset embeds a 50 MB user-free internal memory and a 96 MB SDRAM memory. The storage space can be expanded up to another 16GB through the hot-swappable microSD slot card. The device comes with a 4GB microSD memory card included in the sales package.
Email & Messaging: *
THE KILLER FEATURE ON THE DEVICE. Period. The Nokia Email implementation on the Nokia E75 is simply put, awesome. I have loved the email implementation on the E75, and I probably could have written an entire post here. However, fellow Nokia blogger CJ has already posted the Ultimate Bible of Nokia Email on the E75, and I don’t think I can do a better job than that! Nokia Email on the E75 finally comes with HTML support, and that’s a vast improvement over the current versions floating around. Its the closest I’ve felt to a Desktop mail client yet, but there are a few niggling issues, which can be corrected(There is no way to get back to Inbox from the Home Screen, when you get a new email). It remains to be seen if the same VASTLY improved, integrated client is released on the other E-Series devices as well, which means the E75 would lose its exclusitivity.
Setting up your Email on the E75 is quite an easy and simple process. The user can set up either his usual mail accounts like Gmail, Yahoo, MSN etc or can opt to set up his CORPORATE EMAIL account which also did not pose much hassles through guided efforts of the administrators.
A brief condensed procedure of setting up your Email on the E75:
Go to the standby screen of your E75 and choose “set up my email” or Alternatively go to Menu and select the option of “Email”
Press Start on the device wherein an introduction screen comes up.
It will ask you to select a connection to connect from your device. Choose one and proceed.
Feed in your Email address and Password and you are all set to go.
You can always change notification settings from the Settings option in Email.
Pros:
• The Nokia E75 offers a compact design while managing to fit in a full QWERTY keyboard.
• The smart phone ships with Nokia’s new messaging client, which features push delivery for all accounts.
• Good Music through the 3.5 mm jack output.
• Sturdy rock solid built.
• Definitely an improvement over the E71.
Cons:
• The E75 is expensive.
• Call quality wasn’t the best, and the dial pad on front is a little cramped.
• Bad Camera
• Fingerprints and smudges on the body gloss.
• Screen size should have been more than what Nokia gave.
THE VERDICT
In my honest opinion, haven seen some of the best business oriented smart phones in the market, I would definitely opt for a E75 purely because of the ease with which it meets the needs of business today while adding that personal touch to the device to make it a dedicated personal computer. It definitely gives the Blackberry a run for its money with the stylish form factor and feature loaded OS. Switching between Business and Personal Modes is an awesome feature that Nokia has incorporated into the E75.
So a thumbs up for the Nokia E75!