Pros Well-built chassis. Spacious and highly thummable QWERTY. Easy to set up
and usepush email service. High-speed connectivity.Integrated 3.5mm headphone
jack
Cons Fingerprint-attractingglossy fascia.Ordinary camera performance.Superfluous
dual homescreen mode.
Traditionally Nokia’s Eseries smartphone range has been aimed squarely at the business user, but last year’s QWERTY-packing E71 and E66 slider both rocked up with slinky designs and multimedia chops that screamed crossover appeal. It latest member, the E75, continues this trend for blurring the lines between business and pleasure.
Yet despite angling for the mainstream acceptance, the Symbian S60 powered E75 is still a business handset at heart. Its design, reminiscent of the E51, is smart rather stylish and doesn’t possess the slimline wow factor of the E71. However, like its Eseries compadres, it’s well made with a 139g solid heft and quality metallic rear panelling.
Glossed over
Rather annoyingly, the E75 continues Nokia’s penchant for overly glossy finishes, so finger print smears blot the fascia. Another small gripe is the cramped soft/call and one-touch shortcut key cluster around the navi-pad that will have our fat-fingered friends cursing. Otherwise, the phone proved fantastic to use.
The E75 isn’t the most svelte of phones, mainly because it’s the first of the Eseries stable to pack a sliding QWERTY keyboard. The spring heeled and robust slider mechanism opens to reveal a flatbed but roomy thumb-friendly keyboard. The display is also quick to orientate itself to landscape mode when the keyboard is nudged into action.
Start pushing
Nokia’s new Messenger service is also onboard, rivalling BlackBerry’s push email setup in every respect. Setting up your personal email clients is a cinch – just enter your address and password and it will do the rest– and you can add up to 10 accounts. Of course, corporate sets up like Microsoft Mail for Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes Traveler are also supported.
Nokia still persists with its mode switch to toggle between work and personal homescreens and the jury is still out to whether we need this feature. Still, if you really require that work/home separation then it could prove useful.
Listen with headphones
The E75’s multimedia set up is similar to the E71’s bar a few new additions. The most noticeable and welcome is the integrated 3.5mm headphone jack. Plug in your own quality earphones and the capable music player sounds dynamic and highly listenable and with a link to Nokia’s Music Store you can download tunes direct from the handset.
The VGA-quality video recording frame rate has been boosted from 22fps of the E71/E66 to 30fps and delivers decent footage. Similarly, the autofocus-driven 3.2MP camera is OK rather than class leading but will be adequate for most users. And just to emphasise the E75 has fully embraced the multimedia life, it now supports N-Gage gaming.
Road worthy
While its camera and video performance creaked a little, the E75 has nose for navigation. Sniffing out a GPS fix was almost instantaneous and with Nokia Maps 2.0 embedded and three-month trial thrown in for gratis, it proved an adept guide. With 7.2Mbps-flavoured HSDPA and built-in Wi-Fi at the helm, full-fat web surfing was also hassle free, especially if you opt for the fantastic onboard Opera Mini browser.
If you still like the traditional phone format but need that full QWERTY for messaging then the E75 is currently your best bet. It’s all round messaging and multimedia performance was hard to fault and is welcome addition to the Eseries clan.
0 Comments