Nokia E75 review: Business on the slide

f we can think of one reason to take being told "to mind your own business" with a smile it would be the Nokia Eseries. A household name for enterprise users, it's hardly a surprise that each E-series update is greeted with plenty of excitement. The Nokia E75 is no exception, even if it doesn't really put anything new on the table.

   

The side-sliding QWERTY form factor lands on Symbian turf following a reasonably successful spell on the WinMo side of the yard.

The major novelty of the Nokia E75 is the form factor and we're about to see if this is enough for it to carve a niche out for itself in a crowded market.



There's no denying that if a side-sliding QWERTY is good enough for a teenage-targeted music phone (the Nokia 5730 XpressMusic), it must be more than at home in a full-featured business phone. Welcome to the Nokia E75.
Key features
2.4" 16M-color TFT display of QVGA resolution 
Four-row side-slide QWERTY keyboard 
Quad-band GSM and tri-band 3G (with HSDPA) support 
Symbian OS with S60 3.2 UI 
369 MHz ARM11 CPU 
3.5mm standard audio jack 
microSD card slot, 4GB microSD card prebundled 
3.2 megapixel auto focus camera with a dedicated shutter key, geotagging and VGA@30fps video recording 
Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g with UPnP technology 
Built-in GPS receiver and Nokia Maps with 3 months of free voice-assisted navigation 
USB and stereo Bluetooth (A2DP) connectivity 
Steel battery cover 
FM radio with RDS 
Remote Wipe functionality 
Carrier-independent VoIP support 
Office document editor 
User-friendly Mode Switch for toggling two homescreen setups 
Smart dialing 
Main disadvantages:
Rather expensive at this point (more than 350 euro) 
Controls around the D-pad are too tiny 
Mediocre camera performance 
Fingerprint-prone cheap-looking front 
Wiggling cheapo camera key 
Limited battery life (in comparison to the E71) 

Even if we leave aside the scores of competing business handsets, the Nokia E75 still faces quite stiff competition from within the E-series range itself. It's unreasonably close to the E90 as far as pricing is concerned and is quite uncomfortably cloning most of Nokia E71 functionality. The side-sliding QWERTY keyboard and FP2 are pretty much all the E75 has over the E71.