Full Review

From the Nokia stable, the Nokia E75 is the first phone that came out with the recently launched Nokia Messaging for better e-mail experience. It is an E-series phone that sports a slide-out QWERTY keyboard like the HTC Touch Pro.

Features & Design
Look-wise, the Nokia E75 looks more like the thicker version of E51 with metallic and plastic casing that also added to overall build quality which is solid and strong without looking so robust. Different color variants from silver black, red and copper yellow are available. The whole front is quite glossy which is very easy to mess up with smudges and fingerprints.

A nice aspect of the Nokia E75 is its speed — even when running multiple applications, there is little lag or delay.

The front has the similar 2.4-inch TFT screen found on the E71 but we felt it’s time for Nokia to offer a bigger screen.  And it is as crispy and clear as the one on E71.  The screen rotates and automatically changes to landscape mode when the QWERTY slides out. Shortcut keys for  volume, camera and customizable button on the side while microUSB port and microSD card slot are on the left. We loved the inclusion of 3.5mm headphones port and the long-awaited USB charging support. The back has a 3.2MP autofocus camera and LED flash. Two noticeable features are VGA@30fps video recording and geotagging feature.

The software feature is rich with a lot of extras stuffed in it. The most prominent ones would be the Symbian 9.3 OS S60 3rd Edition UI with Feature Pack 2 and Nokia’s email application. With this new Nokia’s Messaging service, 10-email accounts like Gmail, Yahoo! Or Windows Live mail can be set up and it has full HTML-email support. For business users, it supports synchronizing email, contacts and calendar entries over Mail For Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes Traveler.

Performance and Usability
The alphanumeric keyboard is easy to use but using the buttons around the navigation thumb wheel is a hit or miss. Each rather tiny button shared by two functions is quite annoying and requires close attention. The slide out Qwerty keyboard despite their large size did not offer the great tactile experience we expected and takes a little getting used to.

The interface is the known regular S60 interface with a few more enhancements. Symbian users will feel right at home.  The phone’s response is quite speedy and does not show noticeable lagging even while multitasking. For document handling, the preloaded Quick Office let us create, edit and view MS documents. Adobe PDF Reader also let us access PDF files and there is a handy Zip utility to handle compress files.

For connectivity, the HSDPA capable E75 also has Wi-Fi, built-in GPS receiver, Bluetooth 2.0 and bundled a 4GB microSD card for storage. Browsing experience was as good as the one on the E71. GPS using the Nokia Map2.0 was decent but it took at least 10 minutes for a satellite lock to happen. Once this is fixed, the Nokia Map led the way for us smoothly. The camera shot slightly better images than the E71 and we noticed that the sound quality of the music playback has improved a lot. The E75 pumped out more depth and more details in the music which is  not usually the case for smartphones.

Bottom Line

Plenty of features with a slide-out QWERTY keypad. The Nokia Messaging Service, makes messaging a breeze on the E75.
Overall, the Nokia E75 is a good smartphone with almost all the smart features we could think of and a decent performance. However, the slightly higher price and lack of many revolutionary features won’t attract many users.