Nokia's new unlocked business slider is sleek and stylish like the Nokia E71, but hides the QWERTY in a narrower package. Check out our Nokia E75 review.
Review summary of the Nokia E75:
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 The Nokia E75 is more than a slider version of the Nokia E71 (or Nokia E71x on AT&T). Many of the problems we had with the latter phone have been worked out, leaving us with a more polished and pleasant device. In fact, the Nokia E75 is our new favorite among Nokia's Eseries business phones, and it's one of the best business-focused phones on the market. For features and productivity software, the E75 can't be beat, with advanced Office editing tools that beat similar Windows Mobile devices, and a better Web browser, camera and multimedia kit than most BlackBerry phones. The design is slim and solid, and we think it will appeal to buyers who don't want an obtrusive QWERTY slab up front, but would rather have a stylish phone with a hidden, sliding keyboard. Plus, the keyboard itself is wide and comfortable to use. The aging Symbian S60 interface drags the phone down a bit, and some of the signature features, like the Business / Personal switch, didn't live up to our expectations. Still, we think this phone should have appeal beyond the unlocked market, and serious business users tired of the same old touchscreen tablet or QWERTY slab would do well to give this phone a look. Release: May 2009. Price: $380.
Pros: Sleek, slim design with a full QWERTY keyboard and solid materials. Loaded with great features for business and personal use.
Cons: Symbian OS is ugly and not intuitive. Interface in every app could use polish and modern look. Camera lags behind better Nokia phones.
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Full Nokia E75 Review:
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Design – Very Good
The Nokia E75 is a narrow little slider phone with stylistic cues that are reminiscent of other recent Eseries devices we've seen, especially the Nokia E71. It's a dense, heavy phone, but it's also smaller than most similar smartphones we've seen, and we appreciate the stainless steel housing. The phone felt like it could take a serious beating. The slide mechanism was tight fitting and solid, with enough room for the keyboard, but even closed the phone felt great.
The number keypad was a bit short, and the keys didn't get the height they needed, but it was still very usable, and you won't be texting on the numbers anyway. We did have trouble with some of the dedicated keys just below the screen. Nokia fits two functions on each button, and it was easy to press the wrong one. This was a problem when we meant to press "Delete" and ended up pressing "End." Still, if you find the Nokia E71 or the BlackBerry Tour too wide, you'll appreciate the narrow Nokia E75.
The 2.4-inch screen on the Nokia E75 looks great, and it was very responsive to the orientation switch when we slid open the keyboard. There was a moment or two of delay while it would redraw, but it was faster than most phones that switch to landscape mode. The screen was bright and colorful, though it didn't quite have the eye-popping contrast of the OLED screen that Nokia is using on their Nokia N85.
The Symbian S60 interface is currently the oldest shipping UI design on a modern smartphone, and it shows its age with wiry-looking text and an uninspired layout. There are no bells and whistles here in the interface. Even the phone's distinguishing feature, the ability to switch between Business and Personal modes, was really just a simple wallpaper swap accompanied by a new set of shortcut keys. Every other smartphone OS looks better, even BlackBerry OS and Windows Mobile, both of which lagged behind until recently. Nokia phones may be solid when it comes to features, but they aren't very fun to navigate and use.
Calling – Very Good
Calls on the Nokia E75 sounded pretty good. Our callers reported a nice, clean sound with an even balance of high and low tones. On both ends of our calls, we could hear a bit of swooshing static, but this was never intrusive and didn't interfere with voice tones. Reception on the E75 was solid, with a full load of signal bars as we connected through AT&T's HSDPA network in the Dallas metro area.
The phone doesn't pack quite the power of the larger Nokia E71, but we still got almost 5 hours of talk time out of a single charge, which is better than Nokia's 4 hour estimate. Nokia phones also have excellent standby times, and we left the Nokia E75 more than a week without charging to find it still had plenty of battery power left for calls and Web browsing.
There are a few options for synchronizing your address book with the Nokia E75. You can use Nokia's desktop software, which will synchronize your phone with Outlook or other local address books. You can also use a Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync server like we did, which will sync over the air. We'd like to see Nokia adopt more over the air options. Competitors like the Palm and HTC are building out support for Facebook and other social networking contacts, and we'd like to see Nokia build this option into their smartphones, as well.
Like most Nokia phones we've tried, the Nokia E75 just couldn't get the voice dialing right. The phone has speaker-independent voice dialing, and the app even gets its own button. But in our tests, the E75 never once guessed correctly when we asked it to dial a name from our address book. The speakerphone on the Nokia E75 was fairly loud, and it worked well for calls and for emergency music playback. Conference calling with the Nokia E75 was easy and intuitive, and we had no trouble making 3-way calls and then splitting them up again.
Messaging – Very Good
The Nokia E75 has some nice features for e-mail, especially for corporate e-mail users. We synchronized the phone with our corporate Exchange account as well as our personal Gmail account, and both worked flawlessly. Nokia's Mail for Exchange was a little sluggish, but it packs in some nice features, including support for e-mail subfolders, which we use often. For Gmail, the phone did a fine job configuring our account without our help, though you can dig into the manual controls if need be.
Nokia doesn't include an IM client on the phone, which is even more disappointing on this device, with its comfy keyboard and fast networking. Since it's Symbian OS, there are probably loads of third-party apps available, but we like IM to be an out-of-box feature. Still, the phone has plenty of SMS and MMS options, and sending photos and multimedia to a variety of online services was easy, thanks to some very good preloaded options for Flickr, Nokia's Ovi and others.
We liked the keyboard on the Nokia E75 very much, perhaps even more than the keyboard on the Nokia E71. The wide QWERTY layout had a great, soft-touch feel, and though the surface of the keyboard was mostly flat, each key had just enough travel to provide us with a healthy click. The keyboard doesn't have an arrow-key layout, but it does have keys for symbols we use often, like the @ symbol. We could do without the large silver bar down the center, but it won't get in the way of your typing.
Scheduling and Productivity – Very Good
The Nokia E75 has a full suite of business productivity options, plus a few features that are unique to this phone and the Nokia E71. For Office documents, the E71 uses QuickOffice, a neat, effective tool for creating and editing Word, Excel and even simple PowerPoint documents. While many smartphones of this caliber won't let you create a new Office document, QuickOffice 6 Premier on the Nokia E75 won't give you such hassles. You'll also be able to open E-mail attachments with no problem.
For scheduling, like with the address book, you can synchronize with your desktop apps, or with an Exchange ActiveSync server. The calendar app wasn't very good looking, but it was useful, an improvement over older versions. As you scroll through the month view, you'll also see appointments for the selected day. From the m=Month view, you can even select an entire week as a row, and the phone will cleverly jump to the Week view. A nice trick. Still, we'd like to see some more polish and color injected into the aging design.
The phone doesn't get the same cool option for silencing rings that we liked on the Nokia E66. On that phone, if you get a call at a bad time, you simply flip the phone onto its face and it goes silent. The Nokia E75 didn't have this feature. You do get a dedicated top-level icon that lets you quickly switch between a work and a home profile. This changed the theme of the phone as well as a host of menu and sound options. It was useful, but would have been much improved as a hardware button, and not a menu item.
Multimedia – Very Good
The Nokia E75 did a nice job handling media playback, perhaps even better than we expected from this business oriented device. Though the media player is buried deep within the submenus when the phone is in Business mode, it shows up as a top-level shortcut in Personal mode, which makes sense. The media player isn't very pretty, but it does a great job handling your tunes. You can synchronize with the Nokia PC Suite software, or, if you're a Mac user, you can simply drag music onto the phone when it's connected to your desktop as a mass storage device. We were to find that of our album artwork came through in the transfer.
The Nokia E75 also has a nice hardware package for multimedia. The phone lacks a wealth of internal storage, but Nokia bundles a 4GB microSD card, which is fairly generous, and you can use your own cards up to 16GB. Unlike the Nokia E71, the Nokia E75 uses a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, so you can plug your own earbuds into the phone. The E75 also supports stereo Bluetooth, and it has an FM radio built in. The onboard speaker wasn't great, just a mono speaker around back, but it did sound pretty clear, even though it lacked the dynamic stereo sound we prefer.
Videos looked good on the Nokia E75, and the video player was powerful enough to play just about any file we threw its way. The player had no trouble downsizing VGA videos to match the QVGA screen resolution. These clips still looked a bit pixelated and blocky, but playback was smooth and our movies were bright and colorful.
Web browsing – Very Good
The Nokia mini-map Web browser is one of the best Web browsers on any mobile device. The WebKit technology that Nokia uses has also been used to better effect on more modern-looking browsers, like the Palm Pre browser and the Apple iPhone browser, but even though Nokia's browser lacks a solid interface, it does a fine job at rendering pages. The Nokia E75 makes good use of Nokia's browser, especially on AT&T's fast HSDPA network. Pages loaded very quickly and looked sharp and accurate on the device's screen. The phone's mini-map gives you an overview of the page while you scroll, and scrolling was very fast and smooth using only the 4-way button. We especially like the "back" view that gives you thumbnails of recent pages to cycle back through. Our biggest complaint is that Symbian OS is a very nagging system. Throughout the device, it seemed like the phone was continually asking us whether we wanted to use Wi-Fi or the cellular data network. Even when we made our choice, the phone would often forget and ask us again in the next session. We prefer when a phone uses Wi-Fi when available, then switches to cellular when it's not.
Camera - Good
The camera on the Nokia E75 is improved slightly from the camera on the Nokia E71, and though it wasn't without problems, it's still a nice camera for a business-class device. The 3.2-megapixel shooter uses auto focus to sharpen shots, and features a 2-stage shutter button so you can focus, then shoot. That button is placed poorly, though, and occasionally you might press to hard and find yourself pushing the two halves of the slide apart instead. Also, the camera was fairly slow to start up. We had to hold the camera button for 5 seconds or more before the phone would react.
Pictures taken with the Nokia E75 had a nice level of detail, but some of the colors tended to dominate the scene. Deep blues and reds appeared oversaturated, and whites and greens took on a slightly bluish tint. The auto focus wasn't able to handle properly aim during severe close ups for macro photos, but close ups still looked good if the center object dominated the frame. Self portraits were easy, thanks to the mirror on back and the dedicated camera shutter button. The Nokia E75 is able to shoot videos at VGA resolution, but quality was horrible. Videos had too much noise in low light shots, and too much blockiness and pixelation in well-lit scenes. Overall, videos were disappointing, considering the high-resolution sensor. Check out our image samples below for still shots from our shooting tests.
Wildflowers
Flower close up
Leaves and berries in the foreground
Self Portrait
Saturated red flowers
GPS – Very Good
For GPS navigation, the Nokia E75 uses Nokia Maps. It's not a very good looking GPS navigation app, but for turn-by-turn directions, it certainly got the job done. We'd like to see an interface refresh and perhaps some more vibrant colors in the color palette. Still, the Nokia E75 had no trouble finding our position, and Nokia Maps did a nice job keeping track of us throughout our trip. We also like that the Nokia E75 uses GPS to geo-tag photos.
Price and availability
The Nokia E75 is available from Nokia and other online retailers for around $400.
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