Nokia E75 An Overview

MobileFunatics handled and reviewed a fair amount of Nokia smartphones and feature phones over the years and lately, this leading mobile phone manufacturer has been on a roll, churning out more handsets over the past few months than we can keep track. Without a doubt, Nokia offers some of the most varied line-up of cellular devices to over grace this planet. Sadly though, while they hadn't quite got that mythical iPhone killer and frankly, it seemed they were not really all that bothered maybe the n97 will prove to But before we get our hands on that particular mostel, we took a look at E75, launched last month, and decided it was worth a once-over.
For a smartphone, the E75 is sufficiently specced and a suitable mobile companion for business users who are not into the "latest and greatest" or just prefer more traditional handling method, button keys and all.Of course, as a horizontal slider with a QWERTY keypad, the graphical user interface orients itself accordingly top fit the usage mode. The inclusion of Wi-Fi in addition to the cellular data transfer options was a good design Buyers get a pretty standard bundle of accessories in the package standard for most other mobile phone makers, but generous for Nokia. For more on the phone's technical details, a list of features, softwares and packaging, head over to tinyurl.com/E75 specs after the break. The following is a quick summation of the phone's usage in terms of benefits and faults.

Prons

1 The phone's appereance isn't going to have passers by stopping and salivating over it from the outside of a display window, but it stil sports a certain class.

2 Voice quality is very good, even while using data protocols through applications such as Skype.

3 Two physical keypads. Yes, two one standard numeric keypad and one horizontal slider QWERTY keypad. This phone is great for texting, e-mailing, instant messaging and even for making the occasional quick edits to office documents.

4 Charging via power adapter and USB link; it may not be a big deal for many people, but for the demographic this phone targets (or should), being able to charge the device while it is linked to a PC or Mac is truly a mandatory bension or smartphones.

5 Very decent battery life, Real-world tests saw the device holding up through moderate to heavy use for a whole day, and sometimes a bit longer, on one charge.

6 Dedicated camera button; a small, but although thoughtful feature to include on a good phone with a decent camera. This is a feature that N-series phones have had for a bit, but is first on E-series devices. The caveat is that it needs to be held down for a few seconds before it switches to camera mode.

Cons

1 Unstable firmware/OS; while still better than some of the other Nokia smartphones, visual artefacts in animated GUI transitions and occasionally poor respnsiveness was noticeable and we did not even stress the device, not even a little bit. After a certain amount of usage, you can actually see the step-by-step process of the UI rendering itself to the next screen as you traverse the S60 grid style menu. It's quite like seeing things in slow motion.

2 No dedicated power button; for someone used to pressing the End key to return to the main menu, a dual End/Power key can be irksome. This is primarily a user preference of course.

3 Somewhat tedious UI navigations and counter-istuitive icon/menu arrangement. Ah Nokia, spend some of that big R&D budget on redesigning a more intuitive user interface It really is about time.

4 QWERTY keypad can be a tad frustrating, even after you get use to it. There is something about its spacing of keys that just doesn't lend itself comfortably to one's thumbs, big or small.

5 T9 texting requires a fair amount of patience. The predictive text dictionary is initially limited and typing with T9 requires a fair bit of floating your thumbs back and forth between the D-pad and the QWERTY.


The Bottom Line

At a price of 37500 rupees, the E75 is a feature filled as it should be. While it's not quite a revolutionary bundle of chips, It is still a very capable phone and mobile device, with fairly use messaging and internet browsing capabilities and a bunch of other features. A decision to purchase this phone would primarily come down to personal preferences. As a side note, it's probably best to use the E75 with a post-paid subscription; we noticed that while it was possible to specify which data profile to use (in essence, EDGE or Wi-Fi), despite being explicity told to run on Wi-Fi only for any number of online tests, at the end of the day, a significant amount of usage mintues would mysteriously disappear.