Nokia E75 – Hands On Review
The new Nokia E75 in black.
The other colors are red and bronze/yellow
I recently received the brand new Nokia E75 as a work phone and have been using it extensively for a little over a week. The foremost impression of the phone is one of elegance an d robustness. Nokia has managed to create a throughly enjoyable work horse of a mobile phone / multimedia gadget. This blog posting details my experiences with the E75.
Quality and feel: physical aspects of the phone
The Nokia E75 is the first Nokia phone to have the side sliding qwerty keyboard. Slated to follow with the same form factor are the (obviously re-badged E75) 5730 XpressMusic and the high end N97. Along with the typewriter-style E71, Nokia has previously utilized a folding qwerty keyboard in the E70. I’ve briefly tried the E71 and used E70 for a long time, so I was very eager to try out the new sliding keyboard.
I am actually a bit undecided on the keyboard. On one hand, it is an excellent keyboard and makes writing messages and notes very easy. The slider mechanism is also very robust and just oozes quality – a feat many doubted Nokia could pull off before the phone came out. On the other hand, I feel that out of the box, I was much faster typist on the E70. The E70 also had number keys and escape key for quick window switching in irssi-over-putty sessions.
Despise minor quibbles with the qwerty keyboard, the largest failing of the phone is actually in the number keypad. It has two buttons on every physical button, and I constantly end up pressing wrong keys. I sometimes have to try several times to lock/unlock the keyboard, and have accidently been about to delete items (luckily the phone usually prompts before deleting something). The feeling of the keyboard is plasticy and lacks definition.
After these complaints you may wonder if there’s anything redeeming in the phone? Well, I’d rather say, these are it’s only downsides. The display has the “standard” resolution of 320×240, and at first I was doubtful about the phone, as it’s display has a lower resolution than the older E70. It didn’t make any sense. And let me tell you, the difference is like night and day… E75
beats it’s older brother hands down.
My E75 desktop
The display is large, bright and has vibrant colours. This is probably no surprise to the E71 users, but it sure was to me, and I still catch myself admiring the display every now and then. Sure I’d love the resolution of a 5800 XpressMusic. But can I deal with the 320×240 pixel screen? You bet!
Built quality
- Slider mechanism 9.5 / 10
- Qwerty keypad 8.5 / 10 (yes it’s still good!)
- Number keypad 6.5 /10
- Display 9 / 10
- General feel 9.5 /10
- Average 8.5 / 10
Connectivity
The phone has a standard 3.5mm jack and comes with a bundled hands-free that doubles as a radio antenna. It’s not good, but not bad either. The phone uses the new, smaller Nokia charger cable but can also be charged using the mini-USB cable. The GPS reception is excellent and the bundled license for one year of Nokia Maps is an excellent navigator and has totally replaced the need for google maps for me. The only downside to using the E75 as a GPS unit is the small screen size. For real excellence, the bundled 4gb micro-SDHC card should also be 8gb or preferably 16gb.
Connectivity
- Charger / hands free 9.5 / 10 (for 3.5mm option and flexible charging)
- GPS 8.5 / 10
- Memory card 8 / 10
- Average 8.7 / 10
Software
Quite some noise has been made recently about the new Nokia Messaging service. I decided to trust Nokia to keep my GMail password safe and managed to set up gmail in no time. Since then, emailing and synchronization have worked flawlessly. The only complaint I have is not opening the HTML mails by default.
For work email and calendar synchronization, I installed the Lotus Notes Traveler and apart from slight sluggishness when creating new meetings, the thing works perfectly. Calendar & Email in perfect synch, easy to type emails and fits comfortably into a pocket.
The web browsing experience in E70 was almost-but-not-quite-there. Out of memory errors, sluggishness and lacking browser support made it good for random browsing but not something you’d want to use full time. E75 is a huge step forward in that regard. Aside from pages that force a dumbed down mobile mode, I haven’t had trouble loading any site I’ve tried. I’ve not had memory run out on me a single time, and the browser actually comes with features that we’ve come to expect from a modern browser. Unfortunately, that includes flash ads. If it had the resolution of a 5800 XpressMusic, it’d be perfect. Now, it’s just bearable.
The phone also seems to have at least three different ways of installing more software: WidSets, Nokia Download (it’s called Lataa in Finnish, don’t know the exact translation ) and the N-Gage installer. Each of these is excellent in their own right, the only complain I have is not unifying these under a single banner or at least under a single location in the phone. The Download service had a messenger client that looks just like the Windows Live Messenger, and is (surprise, surprise!) called… Live Messenger. After fiddling with dozen badly working java messengers on the E70, it is a god-send and works very, very well.
I’ve never had any exposure to the N-Gage platform and was quite skeptical of it, when I found it on my business phone. Despite my doubts, I decided to give it a try, as you can download lots of trial version games straight from the phone. Now I’m no gaming expert, I have no idea how the N-gage compares to, say, iPhone App Store and it’s games, but all in all, the platform worked flawlessly and the games managed to impress me (which doesn’t take a lot, since I consider the ascii graphics of Angband good enough). If I was one to play games, I’d have no hesitations about buying N-Gage games.
Finally, the WidSets seem like glorified RSS feeds that give you a nice user interface into many services on the InterNets. Very useful and lot better user interface for pushing information than messing around with web pages on a small screen.
The media player handles MP3 and unencryped iTunes AAC files
I do not own an iPod and mostly listen to my car radio, so I’m not the authority on multimedia, but apart from the limited space of 4GB, I had no trouble moving my iTunes collection to the memory card and the music player is very good and intuitive. The phone also features a music store, which I did not try, and a podcast client with a directory of podcasts that would be perfect for podcast novices like me. The podcast client sent my mobile into some strange loop, however, and I had to restart it. So the idea is good, and it may work well for subscribing to regular podcasts, but it seems to have a bug the beta testers missed.
Software
- Messaging 9.5 / 10
- Browsing 8 / 10 (resolution)
- N-Gage 8.5 / 10 (don’t need no stinkin’ games on my business mobile!)
- Media 8.5 / 10
- Average 8.625 / 10
Conclusions
The E75 is an excellent messaging (email, SMS, messenger) phone, but also a very good all-around multimedia device. It does music, GPS, web browsing and general applications well enough to not need a separate device for any of those functions, and that is saying a lot. I’d say that if you’re even tiny bit into messaging or think you might enjoy a full qwerty keyboard, then E75 is the perfect device for you. It obliterated my iPhone / E90 envy to the point where I wouldn’t trade my E75 for anything, apart from maybe the upcoming N97. This is one of the best, if not the best phone we’ve seen from Nokia up to date.
The completely arbitrary total average score for the Nokia E75 is 8.6 / 10
. So we needed something a little more youthful and refreshing.
