Nokia E75 review
Nokia's E75
The Nokia E75 adds a touch of style and personality to the hum-drum business phone but Symbian operating system could have done with the same kind of makeover.
A welcome break from a world seemingly full of touchscreens, the Nokia E75 is one of the latest phones by the Finnish company that shows the blurring line between business and consumer handsets.
The device is primarily for business users and to prove this has shortcut buttons on the keypad which jump straight to e-mail, calender and the internet browser. Beyond that there are a number of office applications, including a document suite and dictionary while the battery seems strong enough to last sometime without charging. The body of the phone is dark, metallic and feels solid and while slightly bulky is small enough to fit relatively comfortably in the pocket.
Part of the device’s extra girth is for the very good reason of a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, which acts as a useful alternative to the numerical pad beneath the screen. Unlike most other full keyboards on mobile phones the E75 manages to pack all the characters in with plenty of space on each key, meaning you can type with your finger tips rather than finger nails.
On the side is a hot-swappable microSD card slot as well as navigational keys which can be used for scrolling through messages and so on.
Clearly realising that business users are people too, Nokia have also added some more “personal” functions to the E75 that would be considered the norm on most phones but have often been neglected in the business arena.
The phone itself sports a 3.2 megapixel camera – which seems to suffer in low-light conditions but is a good camera phone nonetheless. There is also a headphone jack at the top, making it easy to use the device as a radio or mp3 player. The screen is quite a generous size considering the keypad below it too, so watching films would not be too difficult to do either.
So physically the E75 ticks all the right boxes for a business phone and has some added extras to boot. However the operating system it runs on, one that would be familiar to any Nokia user, struggles to keep up with the functional and slick body it is stored within.
It is not to say that Symbian S60 is terrible – it was once one of the best systems out there. However it is quickly being superseeded by the likes of Google Android and even Windows Mobile and so seems dated and clunky.
Phones, like computers, can be as powerful and functional as is possible but as long as the wrong software is running on it this will not matter. The S60 operating system certainly does not ruin the E75 but it does take some of the sheen away from what is otherwise a very nice business phone. In a market as competitive as the mobile sphere, one weakness like this could be enough to make people think twice about buying it, however.
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Buy the Nokia E75 from O2.ie:
