While the hardware of the Nokia E75 easily passed with flying colors, the more important aspect of any smartphone is the software inside. The review unit that I am basing this off is a production model running firmware v100.48.78, for the record. The E75 is one of the first Eseries to be powered by S60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2, which has been used on Nseries smartphones for a long while now. Feature Pack 2 brings a number of enhancements, including some under the hood that boost power efficiency and memory management, but also includes Destinations, which is *almost* full access point prioritization. Better integration of Nokia services, such as Share Online, Nokia Messaging, and Ovi Chat are also benefits of Feature Pack 2.
System
For starters, the Nokia E75, from boot, has 65MB of internal storage free, which gives plenty of space for applications and themes. There is over 62MB of RAM free, as well, which fully classifies the E75 as a multitasking powerhouse. The E75 is also the first S60-powered smartphone to have Nokia Messaging fully integrated, for a MUCH better email experience than the typical abysmal one that we’re used to with S60. A new setup wizard automatically enters the settings required for most web-based email services such as Gmail or Yahoo!, and you can still manually enter your own settings, if you have a custom email service. HTML support is also built-in, via a link to view the HTML version. This is similar to how the older version of S60′s email client worked, but is now much more obvious to the user. For me, HTML email is not a big deal, since I get very few. I did notice that on the E75, the way that email messages are displayed is much better than on previous phones, such as the E71. You can read our coverage of the email client here. Note that this earlier coverage was with pre-production firmware – the final firmware fixed most of our stability issues.
Once you get into the menu of the E75, the first thing you’ll notice is that there aren’t any folder icons, at all. The icons have been redesigned, keeping with the S60 Touch look (thank goodness), but in an apparent effort to help S60 rookies feel more comfortable with things. I personally think it’s more confusing, as I’m now completely lost as to which icons will open an application or a folder full of more icons. Thankfully, it’s still possible to create new folders, rename existing ones, and move stuff around, so that I was able to put things in a much more logical layout.
Despite the generous portions of internal RAM and ROM, I found the E75′s menus to run slightly slow, specifically with the theme effects enabled. I tried with the menu animations/transitions turned off, which helped, but it did not completely eliminate the problems. The whole thing simply feels like it’s thinking a bit too hard, which is a crying shame, specifically for those of us used to the whiplash speed of the E71 menus.
The E75 brings a few notable software enhancements over other S60v3 Feature Pack 2 phones, such as the ability to open an application when you slide the QWERTY keyboard open. However, I found this incredibly annoying, and quickly disabled it. Audio Themes are also supported, which I absolutely love, and hope to see more of in the future.
The Active Standby on the E75 supports the dual-mode setup that we first saw on the E71 and E66, though admittedly, I haven’t found any real use for that, so I just have the one. You can, as expected, manage the onscreen plugins on the Active Standby, like with other Eseries, to remove unused entries and select others. I was pleased to find that, after installing Ovi Chat (why wasn’t it already installed?), a new entry on my Active Standby showed whether or not I was signed in, allowed me to click from there to login (without having to open the whole app), and even showed how many of my contacts were online! Very nice, and I was even more pleased to see that, when I got an IM from someone, it showed who sent it, as well.
Music
While there is no shortcut to the music player on the E75, I was able to easily remap the calendar shortcut key to open the music player, so that I can have quick access. The phone is fully supported by MediaMonkey, as expected, which makes it simple to load up your favorite playlists. Overall, the music player application is the same as what we’re used to – nothing new here, not even a new visualization. Both the FM Radio and Internet Radio applications are now integrated into the Radio application, and Podcasting is preinstalled, as well.
Audio quality with this firmware through the 3.5mm audio port is definitely nice. While the sound isn’t quite as solid or clear as most Nseries such as the N79 or N81 8GB, it’s definitely usable, either through headphones or a 3.5mm jack, such as I have installed in my truck. I was not able to detect any hiss or clicks or anything, though there is still a slight delay when changing tracks. Sound quality through the built-in speaker is nowhere near as loud as the 5800 XpressMusic, but sounds decent enough for most users. It’s certainly not a boombox, but hopefully you weren’t expecting it to be, either. Tracks with heavy bass will definitely sound bad on the E75.
Photography
Annoyingly, the phone still requires me to press and hold the camera button for no less than 8 seconds for it to open the camera application, which really defeats the purpose of having the dedicated camera button in the first place. Using a shortcut on my Active Standby, the camera is ready to rock and roll in 3 seconds, and takes almost 5 seconds to process the photo. For most Nseries users, this is a complete fail. However, for most Eseries users, the idea of having a real functioning camera button is a bit new, anyways, so they may be able to overlook this.
The quality of the photos, specifically as compared to the E71, though, is quite nice. As you can see below, there is no purple tint to distort and taint your photos, and they’re quite clear, as well. The single LED flash is expectedly weak, but puts forth a valiant effort at lighting things up. It also pulls double-duty as a video light, which is convenient. Share Online is also on board, but with no new destinations such as Facebook, unfortunately.
You can click on each image to access the original photo.
Far Away Image Taken Outdoors:
Close Up Image Taken Outdoors:
Close Up Image Taken In Nearly No Light With Flash:
Gaming
N-Gage is included for the first time on an Eseries, and works quite well. Annoyingly, it does not automatically rotate when you open the keyboard, as the rest of the UI does, but you are able to play games in landscape mode. The d-pad is suitable for gaming, but there are no N-Gage buttons on the top of the phone, as there are on the N85, for instance, so things can be slightly awkward.
Enterprise
For the office workers among us, the Nokia E75 comes with a full version of QuickOffice v4.1, including the ability to create and edit new documents, spreadsheets, or presentations. If you want support for Office 2007, and updated abilities, though, you’ll need to shell out an additional $40 to upgrade to v6.0, which you can do right from the phone.
In keeping with the Eseries moniker, the E75 includes the ability to encrypt both the phone’s internal memory and the removable memory card, to prevent others from having access to your data, and you can also remotely lock the phone by sending an SMS with a preset message inside.
The Nokia E75 features a built-in accelerometer, which can be used for a variety of functions. For starters, the display can automatically rotate based on the orientation of the phone, even without the QWERTY keyboard opened. You can also tap on the display to silence a call or snooze an alarm, or you can flip the phone face down for the same functions. Of course these are all user-configurable, so that you can disable them if you want.
One thing that I know most of you will be excited about is the Notification Light settings, which use the light around the d-pad to alert you to missed events. You can set this to flash for 5 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour, or indefinitely, and for any combination of a missed call, new SMS/MMS, or new email. Unfortunately, there is no option to color-code this notification, so that emails were red, while calls flash blue, for instance.
As we mentioned in our hands-on a while back, you can also set any application, such as Handy Taskman in the screenshot, to open whenever the slide is opened. This could potentially be handy, if you do alot of email or messaging or the like, though I found it rather annoying, personally. You can also have the phone go back to the Active Standby screen whenever you close the slide, which could be handy in most situations. You can also have the slide activate and deactivate the keyguard, if you wish.
Conclusion
Overall, the software on the Nokia E75 is quite nice, with no crashes or random reboots, and a healthy amount of little updates hidden here and there. Unfortunately, despite the generous portions of ROM and RAM, I found the interface to be slightly lethargic, specifically when compared to its E71 and E63 brethren. The multimedia features are there, but nothing to write home about, specifically with the incredibly slow camera. The photo quality is obviously improved over the E71′s purple tint, but still not up to snuff with previous Nseries 3.2 megapixel handsets, such as the venerable N73 or the N78.
For the business user, there is a full Office document suite included, as well as full Microsoft Exchange support, integrated directly into the Nokia Messaging client. Matt Miller posted a great walkthrough of the Microsoft Exchange support, which you can read here.
