Nokia E75 in Smartphones

Leaked low resolution photos of the Nokia E75 first appeared in September last year, but it's taken a further seven months of development for the phone to finally hit the shelves. Has it been worth the long wait?

The initial signs are encouraging - this is a great looking phone. The form factor is candy bar with the bonus of a horizontal sliding Qwerty keyboard - reminiscent of the HTC S740.

Thankfully, Nokia has solved the issue of bulk that affects most similar slide-out keyboard phones; the E75 is a svelte 14.4mm thick, and so is very pocket friendly.

Nokia's E Series devices are usually notable for their build quality and the E75 certainly doesn't disappoint. It's solidly screwed together, and the materials used enhance the sturdy feel.

The plastics don't have the cheap feel of some competitors, and the metallic bits really are metal rather than metal coloured plastic, including a stainless steel back cover.

Where the phone's long gestation period does show is with its screen. Many recent smartphones have included high resolution displays, but the E75's is just 320 x 240. In general that's not a huge issue, but for Web browsing some extra pixels would have been appreciated.

Connectivity is very good, with 3G and HSDPA for when you're out and about, Wi-Fi for when you're near fixed infrastructure, and micro-USB for connecting to your PC. And thankfully Nokia has at long last realised that people like to charge their phones over USB too, so when the device is tethered to your desktop or laptop its battery gets a top-up too.

Being a high end Nokia the phone uses the S60 operating system, and here it's the 3rd edition with Feature Pack 2, so not the very latest version. But anyone that hasn't used an S60 phone for a couple of years will be pleasantly surprised - it's now a mature operating system and has gained some neat usability enhancements over recent years.

We really appreciated the dual mode feature, which allows the user to switch the device between work and personal modes.

The great attraction of the horizontal slider form factor is that the device works as well as a phone as it does for text messaging or email. And email is particularly well catered for on the E75, with support for the new consumer-friendly Nokia Messaging push service, or Mail for Exchange and Lotus Notes Traveler (yes, it only has one L) for corporate users.

Plus of course the phone has on board support for connecting to POP3 and IMAP mailboxes. The only thing missing is BlackBerry connect.

Business users are well catered for, as alongside the great email support there's Quickoffice allowing you to view and edit work documents, a PDF viewer, Zip file management, and of course Nokia's own mapping system which uses the internal A-GPS receiver.

Until recently, high end Nokia phones fell into one of two camps: The E series for Enterprise use and the N series for entertainment. Any crossover was kept to an absolute minimum but with the E75 this is starting to change.

Although it provides all of the facilities that a corporate user needs, there's also a great music player (with 3.5mm headphone socket), both FM and Internet radios, and - most surprisingly - support for N-Gage games.

There's also a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus, flash and VGA video capture. You wouldn't want to watch long videos on the small 2.4in screen, but apart from that Nokia has obviously designed this phone for both work and play.