PureMobile sent over the Nokia E75, one of Nokia’s latest business phones. Let’s see how the phone stacks up compared to the rest of Symbian S60 3.x phones we have around.
The E75 is a business oriented quad-band smartphone, running the latest 3.2 version of the 3.x S60 branch. We received the US version, that offers HSDPA 850/1900/2100 frequencies. It weighs just 139 gr, it has a 16mil TFT QVGA 2.4″ screen, a full QWERTY keyboard and an accelerometer sensor for auto-rotating. It features a 3.5 mm audio jack, 85 MB internal storage, microSD up to 16GB with a 4GB card being included, EDGE/GPRS/HSCSD, WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP support, a microUSB connector for data only, a 3.2 MP camera with audofocus and LED flash, a VGA video-call camera, an ARM11 at 369 Mhz, stereo FM receiver with RDS support, GPS/A-GPS, and a 1000 mAh battery.
The hardware specs are certainly impressive, and the included software, a very-well behaving and dedicated email app, MS Exchange, VoIP SIP etc, are all playing an important role to a modern businessman. Add to that the feature where you can put the phone in “personal mode”, and have for example, launchers in the front-screen that are more entertainment-based (e.g. Camera, mp3 player, N-Gage etc) rather than work-based, make this phone an all-around great gadget for those who want to use the same cellphone for both business and pleasure.
I won’t go into much detail about the S60 3.2 software, since its 98% the same as in the previous phones we reviewed here on OSNews. But I will say this: the icon placement in the various menus on the phone made more sense this time around, than in any other older Nokia phone I have ever used. Additionally, the phone was spiffy fast.
WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and cell reception all worked perfectly with the unit I received, and with acceptable voice quality. Online, there’s quite some complaining about cell reception, but my unit worked just fine. Where it didn’t work fine, was in battery life though. I get less than 4 days of standby, which is of course extremely short. I made sure that VoIP, WiFi, email, BT are all off, but I still don’t pass the 4 days of standby battery life! Other people don’t complain about this online much though, so there’s always the possibility that my specific battery unit is problematic. To its credit though, its battery fills up really quickly when charged!
Camera performance is very so-so, but its VGA video recording quality was acceptable (right click to save in order to watch it). Not as good as the iPhone 3GS’ though. The phone has a lot of camera-specific tweaking menu options, more than most other phones, so that alone should please the photography geeks.
One of the most important features of this phone is of course its 4-row qwerty keyboard. It’s a great feature to have, but, it could have been better. The keys are so close together and not at an angle/separation, making it difficult to know if you pressed a key, or two keys… More over, the upper row is too close to the edge of the upper sliding part of the phone, and so when you try to type on that row, your thumbs keep hitting that part, making it difficult to type fast. My husband had the exact same problem with it when I insisted that he should try it.
I would like to take a bit of a semi-detour here and say something about the great VoIP SIP support this phone has. From all the Nokia phones I have tried, this seems to have the most stabler VoIP SIP support so far (the phone stays “registered” to the VoIP server for a long time without dropping out as older Nokia phones used to do here). I am extra happy to say that I have configured my Google Voice account to talk to my Gizmo5 VoIP SIP free account. This way, I get a free call-in. Anyone can call my Google Voice number, and my E75 will answer in VoIP mode! How cool is that?
Overall, this is a great business/pleasure phone, without an identity crisis. VoIP is for me its strongest point, but battery life its weakest link. Still cool though.
Rating: 7/10
I have been eyeing this phone for the past 2 weeks. I have an original edge iphone, and have been considering upgrading to the e75, with a 16gb mini sdhc. I used to own a e61, but my dad took it and gave me the iphone. I really liked the e61 and am trying to decide if i should wait for the e72 to be released in the US or get the e75. The e75 is very tempting because of its keyboard.
Personally, I still prefer the iPhone. Although, I have really small hands/fingers, so I can type on its soft-keyboard really fast.
I own the E61 too btw. If you are into VoIP, the E75 is stabler.
Edited 2009-07-11 01:45 UTC
i have small hands too, so i think it would work for me. i am hesitating because of the battery life. All the reviews I read no one ever mentioned standby time with all the extra stuff turned off, like bluetooth and wifi. Which is what i find most important, because thats how i mostly use my phone. I turn stuff on when i need them and turn them off when i’m done. Everything I could find online was about people complaining how the phone would only last 1 day with wifi constantly scanning and push email and this all other stuff, which i don’t really plan on using. So thank you!
I have gigantic hands, and I also like the iPhone keyboard, but I had never used a thumb keyboard for any period of time before the iPhone so I didn’t need to un-learn anything.
I have an E71 now and I love it. The size of the phone is amazing with how thin it is. I do really love slide out keyboard phones like the E75 and if I had to choose all over again between the E75 and the E71/72, it would be a touch choice, but I think I would still go with the 71/72 for the thinness. Despite the size of the phone, they keyboard of the E71 is still very good and assuming they didn’t change it too much for the 72, you should be in good shape there.
The e72 has a 3.5mm headphone jack which is a big plus for me. 5mp. camera, 600mhz cpu as opposed to the e71’s 369mhz, and a new optical navigation key. I was considering the e71, but the 2.5mm headphone jack is a bit of a let down for me. I like to be able to carry 1 device as opposed to a mp3 player and phone, so my phone sees very heavy usage in terms of music, and i have had bad experiences with adapters in the past (original iphone, and e61). Maybe I will just wait for the e72 to come out.
I love my current Nokia and want to continue to love Nokia, but their software, while nice, appears to be faltering in the face of Android, Palm Pre and the iPhone. I’m in the market for a new phone, but I’m hesitant to touch Nokia now—it’s as if I hope someone ports Android to the Nokia so I can still enjoy a Nokia phone, while leveraging modern phone software.
I don’t know why people keep saying this. In all the reviews i read about the e75 that was one of things that stuck out. I never really found problems with symbian on my e61. But then again, I don’t really do much, and even on my iphone i have maybe 5 apps installed.
E75 looks pretty nifty, i’ve had an E63 for a few months now, and have very few complaints.
Biggest one is that symbians connection management is awful – it doesn’t connect to WiFi where it is available, and fall back to 3G when it is out of range of a WiFi AP, you have to manually select a connection all the time. Thats mostly not a problem in practice, but i would like to define my home and work APs, then just forget about having to select a connection for each app i use.
Symbian OS seems pretty poorly thrown together, the menu structure makes very little sense to me, and you can’t organise things as you want them, beyond very simple customisations.
Battery life is great for a phone like this though, and the keyboard is as good as i’ve used on a device of this form-factor. I much prefer a physical keyboard to an on-screen one though i’m sure i could get used to on-screen.
I use this phone to send/receive txts, listen to MP3s, receive and send emails, talk on IRC, take photos and occasionally make calls – it does all those things pretty damn well, and the browser is great for such a small device.
I almost bought an iPhone, but have no regrets. If Nokia could just give the UI some love, it’d be pretty much perfect.
I have a Nokia 5800 touch screen with Nokia Symbion OS and it’s fine. I think Symbion compares favorably to Android and Palm Pre. It’s not as fast as iPhone’s implementation of OSX but it’s sufficient and doesn’t give me problems. There are a few Symbion applications, however, that are buggy on this phone (Garmon XT navigation software for example, which is prone to lock up or stop responding) but this is the fault of the application and not the Symbion operating system itself.
If you do any form of multi-tasking, then Symbian is the best in the market currently. Though WebOS and Android are good at it too, it doesn’t have the device variety that Symbian has.
Symbian also has very nice built-in theming capabilities that are often overlooked. Thus far, neither Android, WebOS nor OSX-iPhone supports theming out of the box. If you would like to give your S60 v5 UI an updated look, check out these themes:
http://dsma.deviantart.com/art/iMatte-126937165
http://dsma.deviantart.com/art/iPhone-by-Dsma-128468764
One major area that Symbian needs to improve on is UI usability, which the other OSes are ahead.
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Just have to disagree with one point you made in that Android DOES support theming out of the box: http://developerlife.com/tutorials/?p=309
I also have the Nokia 5800 XM. I mostly got it for its music capabilities, the sound is very good paired with my Sennheiser CX300.
I’m very disappointed in its BT “capabilities” – you can’t pair the phone with a set of Philips bluetooth headset, the phone just won’t find the headset while various SE phones find it within the second. (posted this problem @ Nokia here: http://discussions.europe.nokia.com/discussions/board/message?board…
Another thing: programs asks to connect to Internet even though you’re connected to a WiFi network before launching the application – and there’s nothing you can do about it. That is just stupid.
OTOH I got the phone for €200 new and unlocked, which is a fairly good price. I don’t know why certain people have called this an “iPhone killer” – if this compares to the iPhone in any way, I wonder that the hype is about. I doubt the iPhone is this bad.
I’m one of the early adaptors of the E75, straight from a 9110 Communicator. (From Geos to S60 in a flash!) I chose it for the slide-out keyboard since I got spoiled with the 9110, and since this is my first venture with S60 (or any incarnation of Symbian, for that matter), I just had to undergo a period of familiarity and have settled down. Getting WiFi access allows me to preview my mail so that when I finally download it on my desktop I know what I’ll be getting. And while the qVGA sreen and browser make viewing non-mobile optimized websites a chore, on mobile optimized websites it’s very useful.