Our forum moderator Rwishi has send me this review of the Nokia E75. Enjoy!
Firstly, I like to thank WOM World for sending the device and a special thanks to Phat for giving me the chance for letting me trial the device. Before you start reading the review, feel free to view the Nokia E75 Unboxing pictures or the Nokia E75 Camera samples that we published earlier here on Daily Mobile.
Now onto the review,
The E75 is Nokia’s first side sliding qwerty device and at first glance, you would want to compare it to the likes of the thinness of the Nokia E66 and the qwerty keyboard of the Nokia E90 communicator. There is also the Nokia 5730 which shares the exact same form factor along with the same specs except that the 5730 is focused towards music while the E75 is focused toward the business market.
Updated 2009-04-17
Design:
The E75 is intelligently designed since it has a very thin body factor and hides its weight very well( I wonder whether it thinks it’s a women!) Its has a nice back cover which also serves as a grip when you hold the phone. The only two minuses I found was that Nokia could have easily incorporated a 2’6” screen instead of a 2’4” one. And secondly the keypad which is way too cramped, this will be discussed further in the review…
UI Design;
The E75 is the first E-series device to ship with FP2. This edition wasn’t integrated with the likes of the E71 since FP2 wasn’t very mature when the device was released but now, 1 year later, the version is much more stable and reliable. This gives a chance to the businessmen to savor some iPhone like transitions in the menus. This kinda slows down the overall speed when you are launching apps. Even though its quite eye catching, especially the transition while activating the camera, I would recommend to turn off the transitions in case you want a speedier menu. One last thing I would like to bring forward is the confusing icons that Nokia has incorporated with the themes, so I strongly recommend that you change your theme as soon as possible and get a nice icon pack! I wont go to in depth with FP2 since everybody (?) already knows its pluses and minuses.
Build Quality:
The E75 is very well built with some 75% of the devices’ casing made of metal which makes the device to tip 139g. It might seem heavy but it it surely wont make a hole in your pocket. There are absolutely no creaks and it follows the e71’s reputation of being a well built device. The only negative part is the slight light leaks around the borders of both the keyboards and on the back of the top part of the device. The t9 keypad screams plastic and the qwerty keyboard is completely chromed with the edges of the device also being chromed. I don’t know how far this is true but the guys from Register Hardware were complaining that the paint was coming off from the edges but since all our units are early samples this might be fixed during production.
The slide out QWERTY Keyboard:
The E75 has a side slide out keyboard, a first for Nokia and it seems to work quite well since courtesy of its spring mechanism it can easily be slid with one hand. But it also does have some negative sides since its buttons completely flat it isent very ideal for typing long messages or documents. Since they are flat, you have to apply a considerable pressure on the buttons for the phone to accept the command which might discourage people who are trying the device in the store before buying it. I had various other people try out the device and I received the same response, too flat. This is some very worring news for a device which is supposed to be a messaging device and supposed to aim at the businessmen, but this can be easily fixed in the future device with this form factor y giving the keyboard a slight cosmetic lift. Also since its Nokia’s first device to have a side sliding keyboard, it will take some time for the keyboard to become more useful since at the moment it can only be used for messaging, its up to the developers to get their apps to be able to use the keyboard. It sadly isn’t even properly incorporated with N-Gage which is run by Nokia.
When comparing the Iphone’s virtual keyboard( in landscape mode) with the E75’s phiscal keyboard, they both come up with the same results since they are both of the same physical size. But if I were to pick the best among the two, I would choose the iphone since typing on its virtual keyboard is less tiring.
Nokia Messaging:
Nokia uses the E series to rival the likes of Blackberry’s, so of course it should have similar email services so the E75 comes with complete email services to be able to receive your emails on the go. While on business mode(read misc section) there are all your email accounts that are displayed on the stanby screen which can be updated to your guise.
The T9 keypad:
The T9 keypad is very cluttered since it already has to incorporate the normal keypad buttons( i.e: the two soft keys, the call/end keys, the S60 menu key( called home here), the delete key, the 10 digits and the * and # keys) due to all these buttons plus the messaging key and the calendar key, it sums up into an extremely cramped up keypad, due to this, there has been numerous time swhere I have pressed the delete button instead of the back back button. I also don’t think that Nokia could have afforded to increase the phones width since its already quite wide. In speed terms, its on par with the Nokia N78.
Connectivity:
Connectivity-wise, the e75 is up to date other then it lacks the infrared port which has been available on virtually every of Nokia’s business devices. It has wifi, HSPDA etc etc…,
Camera:
Since it has the same camera optic as the N78, it will be put head to head in this section.
The E75(compared to the N78) produces much more real to life pictures since it kinda adds a slight tint of yellow to its pics. It made all my human test subjects seems as if they had jaundice. This phenomena might be explained by reading this article over at all AAS. Maybe Nokia thinks that business users might only take pics of documents(thus the real to life colors) while media centric people(N78) take pics of their family and landscapes( thus the more bright pics).
Also, don’t get fooled with what you see in the view finder, it might just as well the first mobile phone that I have seen that displays a lower quality view of desired image before you take your pic. Any other device that I have used has always used have shown me a near perfect picture of the when viewing it in the view finder mode.
Now to video recording,
Being able to record at vga at 30 fps, it might be the only place where it crosses the n78 by a little percentage. Since it can have its LED lit up during recording it produces better quality than the n78. Also, for some strange reason, the device would stop recording at its own guise as if it had a mind of its own. But it might be a instruction to stop when the device feels that the led might be becoming to hot.
Misc:
Slide Handling:
In the settings you will find a place where you can handle all settings for the slide. You can have the device to activate any application that you want when you slide the qwerty keyboard out. At first it is quite cool that you can get your email acc opening each time you slide it open but it soon becomes annoying. Another annoying thing that I found was that the device came with a default settings that the device should lock its keypad whenever you close the slide which is really inconvenient since it usually(99.99%) of the time still using the device after I close the device, I strongly recommend that this be your first settings that you change.
Audio Themes:
This is still a well kept secret from newbie user, audio Themes, this a sort of pack that is not a theme as such, its more an audio pack with short sounds/melodies for operation such as going into the menu, exiting the menu, inserting/removing the memory card, etc etc…., in the E75’s case there is an additional sound for the opening/closing the slider. You cant get the audio themes at europe.nokia.com/A4516008
Dual Charging:
The E75 is the 2nd device from Nokia that offers USB charging but this time the affair takes one whole step further by including the traditional 2.5 mm charging port along with the ability for USB charging. I haven’t tried putting up both charging options at the same time and I cant imagine what would happen!
The Camera Key:
I have to say, even though Nokia thankfully put in a camera key into the device and actually lets the camera be activated by the camera key, why in the world does the device take a cool 4.5 secs before it even takes in the command to activate the camera application, so in case you try to start the camera using the camera key, prepare yourself to wait for about 9 secs before you can even think of taking a picture!
Battery Life:
The E75 is powered by a large(ish) 1000 MAh battery which lasts some 2 days on light usage, that is email checking every hour used opera mini for 2 hours a day, a few calls and about 30 mins of sports tracker. That’s impressive since my N78 lasts that long despite it having a 1200 MAh battery.
GPS:
The GPS on the E75 is more sensible then any n-series device I have ever used until today (N95 8gb, N78, N82 etc etc). With my N78, I got my first fix after having kept the GPS activated for about 10-15 mins(with a-gps). On the E75, without a-GPS, it took some 18 secs to get a first fix, right out of the box. Very impressive indeed taking in account that the country in which I live doesn’t have a very good GPS coverage(it wasn’t until august ‘08 that we got some proper gps coverage)
Music:
Entertainment isn’t something that would would expect from an E-series. This stands for the E75 also. The music player hasn’t changed for ages(Nokia, take note!), I have being seeing the same music player since like what? The N95 periods? Time for change! There isent anything special about the single(mono) speaker. Its not very loud but the sound that it produces is crispy(!) and sounds good enough. Even though its volume is quite low, using it as a loud speaker during a call is satisfactory.
Pre-Installed Apps:
The device came packed with the usual office suite app. It isn’t the latest version but hey! Its better than nothing! For such a suite, we would have to shell out something between $45-65 to be able to get it on an s60v3 device.
Another cool app that came with the device was the bar code reader, its nothing new but it avoids the pain for searching and installing one even though I was expecting something like the Nokia Magnifier app.
Also, Nokia was kind enough to include the Nokia PC suite 7. This was done since there isn’t any cd supplied with the device.
Conclusion:
For me, the E75 is an exact copy in terms of hardware with the N78. Like the N78 which had introduces many new things to the market( FP2, FM Transmitter, Navi-Wheel, Audio Themes Etc), in the same way, the E75 introduces a new form factor into Nokia already very diversified catalog of device from factors, It also introduces the E-series line up with FP2. Nearly all devices that Nokia have released, be it the 3250, the n78, N95… have sold a nice number of units, especially the N95, which had crossed the 10 million mark at the beginning of 2008 if I am not mistaken. Even though the E75 wont sell the same magnitude of units, we can call it the N78/N79 of the E series, a low mid tier device which packs in a lot of features at an affordable price( after a few price drops of course!). So in a wrap, I would say that the E75 is a 50-50 preposition and that it is a good recommendation.
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