Nokia E75

We make no bones about it: we love the current Nokia E-Series aesthetic. We think the Finns at times miss the mark with design, the Xpress music range is a good example, but the last two years of E-Series handsets have been a pleasure to see and touch. The E75 is a stunner; it has a collection of reflective surfaces and stainless steel that moulds seamlessly with a glossy piano-black finish. On the back of the phone, the battery cover is textured stainless steel, which gives the handset a pleasing tactility.
When taking the E75 out of its box, the first thing you'll notice is its weight. While 139 grams may not sound like much, the difference in weight to other handsets is noticeable — though if anything, it acts to give the E75 a feeling of sturdiness. Navigation of the phone is mostly performed using a standard arrangement of nav-keys and a numeric keypad, but the real selling point for the E75 is the slide-out QWERTY keyboard underneath. It's lucky it's there too, because the numeric keypad on top is terribly small and cramped.
The QWERTY keyboard is better than its tiny T9 counterpart. It lacks the definition of raised keys, but makes up for this with impressively wide buttons. Each individual key is almost twice as large as keys found on competing phones. This is both a good and bad thing: good because it makes making a mistake much harder, but bad because your fingers have to move much more than you might be used to. We found that when we typed long messages our hand position changed constantly to accommodate the larger pad. We should also note that the slider mechanism is far from the best we've seen. Even without opening the slide, the top part rattles loosely against the bottom half. This is significantly more noticeable when opening the phone, and detracts from the phone's premium quality feel.
The E75 charges using a Nokia charging pin charger, and connects headphones via a standard 3.5mm socket located on the top of the headset. On the side of the handset you find two separate ports, one for USB connections and another for microSD cards. A 3.2-megapixel camera is located on the back with an LED photolight and a self-portrait mirror.

Features

If you've used a Nokia in the last year or so then the E75 will be an easy phone to pick up and play with. It runs on Nokia's Series 60 operating platform (version 3.2), which looks and works a lot like previous versions. As a business phone, you get all the connectivity options you'd expect; HSDPA, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, but it's been a while since we saw a smartphone lacking any of these hardware options, and the real point of difference exists in how these components integrate with the apps on-board.
To its credit Nokia has finally produced a decent email client. Nokia has, for a long time, included email in some form or another on its S60 phones, but the new Nokia Messaging brings all the important elements together into one very easy-to-use application. Setting up a new account is as simple as punching in your account details (in most cases). Business email through MS Exchange requires a few extra bits of info, like your email domain and server, but is likewise very easy to set up and use. The E75 is capable of supporting one Exchange account and up to 10 private email accounts simultaneously, with new messages pushed to your handset as soon as they are delivered to your email server.
Everything else is as expected. There's a nice range of business tools like a PDF reader and QuickOffice, and a barely noteworthy range of media software. The image gallery is fast to browse, but when we tested the video player we found it supported only a small selection of the files we tested, playing 3GP and WMV files. Interestingly, the E75 is also the first E-Series phone to support Nokia's N-Gage gaming platform.

Performance

We hate to seem like we're living in the past, but there was a lot to like about last year's E71 ; it looked good, it featured a good mix of hardware and software, and its performance was second to none. It took advantage of a resource efficient interface and delivered great processing and excellent battery life. With the E75, Nokia has repeated only half of this winning formula.
Processing is excellent, jumping in and out of different menus and accessing the various apps is punchy and without visible lag. Opening the slider turns the screen to landscape view mode and even this transition is quick enough so that you never feel like you're waiting for the phone to catch up with you.
Battery life is the let-down. In fact, let-down is too soft a term to use for our experience. The E75 comes with a 1000mAh battery, which is only two-thirds the capacity of the battery in the E71. Charging the phone to full and activating push email for one MS Exchange account and one infrequently used private account was enough to drain the battery in less than 24 hours. If you're in the habit of charging your phone overnight you'll find it back on the charger each evening, otherwise you'll find the phone powers down before you get home. Worse still, the on-screen battery monitor is tremendously flawed — we've found the battery dropping from full to empty with very little notice, the middle bars of the display barely get a look in.
The saving grace is the profile switcher that lives as a shortcut on the Active Standby Bar by default. This switcher activates a second phone profile that can be completely customised with new wallpapers, ringtones and themes, and with different active email accounts. You can have, for example, your MS Exchange account on one profile, and your Yahoo, Hotmail or Gmail on the other. We've found when we switched the profile to the second profile with no push email active that the battery lasted an extra day or two. But doesn't this defeat the purpose of buying a "messaging" phone?

Overall

We don't want to be too harsh on the poor E75, it's a good handset, but poor battery life is the cardinal sin of a portable electronics device, and compared to last year's E-Series phones this is a major step backwards. Nokia has gotten the design right, though it'll be too heavy for some, and the Nokia Messaging client is excellent — better late than never. However, less-than-a-day battery life is appalling, especially when Nokia has achieved so much better in recent times. We recommend picking up an E71 instead, the interface looks old fashioned, but it's a solid handset that continues to perform well in the smartphone market.