Nokia E75 reviewed

The hardware specs include all the staples expected of a modern smartphone, including GPS (with A-GPS), Wi-Fi and HSDPA, plus a 3.2MP camera with LED flash. Output from this is average, and a definite step up from the very poor quality of the E71’s camera. There is also a 4GB microSD card included in the box.

For a phone that should have wide crossover appeal there are a few nods to the consumer market, not least the fact that the phone comes in a number of different colours. It also has a 3.5mm headphone jack and is compatible with the N-Gage gaming service. Battery life was better than expected for a 1000mAh battery (nearly a third less capacity than the E71), getting through about a day of heavy use, or a few days of ‘average’ use.

On the software side the phone runs Feature Pack 2, and includes the Nokia staples, such as Nokia Maps, Quickoffice, the reasonably decent Web browser, and the fairly mediocre PIM tools. The most interesting, though, is the new email client which really is an impressive application. It supports multiple accounts from multiple services, each very simple to set up.

It supports HTML email (although the text version is shown by default), and the inbox has a nicely designed collapsible view that rids the screen of clutter and enables you to quickly find messages from a particular sender or date. Peculiarly, when you open an email via the ‘new message’ notification on the Home screen it doesn’t actually open the email program, just the message, and you need to close it and manually re-open your inbox to continue working with your emails.

There’s much to like about the E75, but arguably it doesn’t feel like a £400 smartphone from 2009, but more like a companion to the E71 and E66 from last year. Even so it is still an excellent business phone, with outstanding design and build quality that should give it plenty of appeal among the consumer crowd as well.

Essential verdict

Performance 8
Mostly very good, though the battery could have been better
Design 9
Very sleek, an impressive slider and superb build quality
Features 8
It’s pretty much all here, with a very strong software bundle
Value for money 7
Feels a little expensive at the SIM-free price

Overall score 8

Review originally published in Smartphone & PDA Essentials magazine. Words by Andy Betts.

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