First Impressions of the E75

I recently bought a Nokia E75 and got a very good deal thanks to a special notice posted by IntoMobile.com. I only paid $265 because I purchased the phone on the Saturday before Father’s day between 9:00 PM and Midnight.

The E75 is a very nice phone and feels great in the hand. It has the very solid feel that is standard for E-series phones. I like the screen and it works well in both the portrait and landscape mode. In addition to a very good screen, the numeric (front) keypad is also very good. The keys are a little small but they are sloped towards each other, which increases the accuracy of the key presses. The inner keyboard is a little more difficult to use because the keys are all perfectly flat. Despite this, it works very well for thumb typing. You can comfortably compose and reply to email using the inner QWERTY keyboard but would not want to type out a novel on it. The E75 has a standard 3.5 mm headphone port. While the 2.5 mm ports on earlier E-series phones were never a big deal for me, it was the cause of many complaints by others. Finally, the materials and construction of the E75 are all first class. In addition to all this, the E75 incorporates an accelerometer and has turn and/or tap to silence calls and alarms. The physical design of the E75 is near perfect and the only thing its missing is TV Out.

I have read other reviews that said that the E75's call quality was not as good as other E-series phones but I have not found that to be true. In fact, I found just the opposite to be true. The E75's call quality is outstanding on both cellular and Internet calls. In addition, the cellular signal strength is better than any other E-series phone I've used, except for possibly the E90 Communicator. Even in very low signal strength areas, the E75 had a usable signal. If you read my review of the E71 last year you'll know that my one complaint on this outstanding phone was the placement of the antenna and the pronounced signal degradation when holding the phone from the bottom. Nokia has completely resolved this issue with the E75 and has even gone one better.

The firmware on the E75 is s60 3rd edition feature pack 2. This version of s60 brings several features that s60 3rd edition has been missing since it was first introduced. One feature, although seemingly minor, is the addition of an adjustable snooze duration in the alarm clock. This feature enables the snooze duration to be adjustable from 1 minute to 60 minutes in 1 minute increments. I know this sounds trivial but I like a 10 minute snooze duration and all previous s60 3rd edition phones had a fixed 5 minute snooze duration. The two other major new features of the FP2 firmware are the new Nokia Email application, which incorporates Mail for Exchange and (finally) HTML, and VoIP version 3. The new Email application, in addition to adding Mail for Exchange to the firmware, also provides access to email folders (other than Inbox). These are both features that have been missing for a long time and make the E75 a messaging powerhouse. As for VoIP, version 3 offers much greater customization by including in the firmware options previously only available by downloading and installing the VoIP Settings application. This version of VoIP has also eliminated the Internet Telephone application by incorporating this functionality into Contacts. After setting up your SIP profile(s), you select your default profile (the profile used to make outgoing calls) from within Contacts. Once activated, all of your contacts are then copied into a mirror directory. This allows you to make normal cellular calls by selecting a contact in the default Contacts directory or Internet calls by selecting a contact in the active Internet Call directory. In previous version of s60 3rd edition, you had to specify the default call type, either cellular or Internet. To place a call using the non-default call type required extra steps to select the call type.

Up until this point there has been a lot to like about the FP2 firmware. Unfortunately, that was the good; now for the bad. First, the initial firmware is very buggy, even more so than usual for an early release of a new feature pack. You'll notice that there are no included screen shots in this post. The reason is that after installing a very few 3rd party applications, the E75 became too unstable to use. Specifically, after installing Handy Shell and setting up Email, the phone went into an infinite loop cycling between the active standby screen, the Handy Shell screen, and the new Email application. I could not find a way to break this loop and had to hard reset the phone. Next, the Mail for Exchange feature of the new Email application has a very serious memory leak. Within a few hours of setting up Email using the Mail for Exchange option, the phone's memory was filled up, making the phone unusable. Specifically, the Other directory in the phone memory became filled with 82 MEG of files. Changing the default email location from the phone memory to the memory card made no difference; the phones memory was still filled up within a couple of hours. Lastly, the VoIP application, in spite of the above noted improvements, is unusable out of the box. In order to actually use VoIP, it is first necessary to download an application from Forum Nokia. Furthermore, I only discovered this necessary additional application by searching the Internet for a solution.

To conclude, the E75 design and materials are both great. However, while the FP2 firmware has great promise, it is so unstable in its initial release that the E75 is essentially unusable. Finally, two of the major features of this Enterprise phone, Email (Mail for Exchange) and VoIP are either unusable and seriously degraded. While I'm confident that these problems will be fixed in a firmware upgrade, I have to say that I'm a little disappointed in Nokia for releasing a phone with firmware that is this buggy.