I picked this phone up for my wife, replacing her aging E51. Overall, it's an improvement over the E51, despite it not being intended as a replacement for it.She loved the form factor of the E51, and is willing to tolerate the added thickness of the E75 in exchange for the slide out qwerty. She wanted to do email and facebook on the phone, primarily, so the qwerty was definitely on the menu as far as she was concerned.
Build quality isn't as good as my E71, though it's pretty good. when working on the qwerty, it feels a bit cheap in my hands, though I suspect that's a common problem with phones of this genre. Application-wise, everything worked, except for repeated problems she had with the built-in Mail for Exchange support (Google Sync for Mail, Contacts & Calendar). This was positively awful. So unreliable, that we wound up purchasing a license for RoadSync, which has proven to be quite acceptable for her. This fact demonstrates that it wasn't a service-related problem, rather a software one.
Battery life is decent, though she's not a super-heavy data user. I'm pleased with S60 3.0 FP2's use of AP groups, allowing you to stack the home wifi above carrier gprs/hspa, which is a huge improvement over FP1 devices. Nice touch it can charge over the micro-usb connector, a welcome change for Nokia devices.
This is my first Smartphone and so I did lots of research online and offline/local in-stores & compared various brands including Blackberries, Samsungs, iPhones, HTC and Nokia E Series. I needed a phone that is deceptively simple on the outside for making voice calls but yet offers full Smartphone functionality inside for both business & personal use. I also needed a minimum of 3.2 Megapixel camera with a fast video recorder and be able to listen to music & radio. Finally, I needed a phone to make international traveling easier.
The Nokia E75 seemed to fit my above needs as it is not too big or too small and offers ready access to a simple regular dialing keypad in the front and lets you use a QWERTY keyboard slide out.
Updated review: Feb 15, 2010: After owning this device for about 4 weeks, I have lowered my rating from 5 stars to 3 stars. Although it seemed to met my needs feature wise, its reliability seems to be questionable. Ocassionaly some keys seem to lockup during non-voice operations. Also, voicecall quality is becoming an issue. In fact I should have heeded to many professional reviewers who also pointed to questionable voice quality.
Finally, I decided to return this back to Nokia for a refund and replacing it with a Nokia E72 model.I bought this phone to my wife, after a very deep research about pros/cons and other consumers comments.
I used for about 2 weeks and then my wife is using it for more than a month, without any problem. She is not a "friend of technical stuffs", but she is operating some functionalities without problem and every day she shows me something new that she learned by herself. This means that Symbian is very easy to understand, learn and follow.
The double keypad/keyboard is very good and the camera better than the E71 (my phone).
GPS works fine almost all the time (faster to initialize than in the E71).
The only 2 cons:
1apparently the wireless antenna is in the top of the phone, so when you are browsing, writing with the extended keyboard, the left hand normally is over the antenna and the wireless signal is not good at all (usually loose connection)
2the memory slot cover was made with plastic (the E71 is with rubber) and if you have no enough care (or long nails) probably you will damage it and then will be very difficult to open.I bought this phone from another merchant, for my son. All was well for awhile then he couldnt send pic messages. He could receive them, but not send them. I went into message settings and made sure everything was correct and fixed that problem and all was well again. Then a week later he couldn't send regular text messages. He could receive them, but couldn't send them. They would just go to the outbox. So we called AT&T and they said it had to be the phone because all of our settings and provisions were correct. Called Nokia and had to do a hard reset (after backing up all pics, files, etc). After that everything worked fine again.
The phone itself seems typical of Nokia Good quality, very durable, packed with features, easy to use, sleek design and feel. The camera is excellent and there are alot of features for use with the camera as far as editing, modes, etc. The screen is a nice size and the coloring is vibrant. My son absolutely loved it, but he is getting tired of the messaging problems. I can't blame him for that. I had bought him a Tilt2, but that phone was absolutely horrible. It locked up/froze constantly and finally took a final freeze and became a paperweight. So we returned it and bought this Nokia E75 since it had most all of the features my son had wanted, except for touch screen and tilting screen. Seemed like a good tradeoff since Nokia's are such good phones.
If we have to do the hard reset on this E75, we may end up returning it. It is simple to do, but it is something that shouldn't HAVE to be done in order for the phone to work properly. Texting is something my son can't live without. He sends and receives over 5000 texts a month. Typical teen these days I guess.
Anyway, overall despite the messaging problem it is a good phone. It processes fast, call quality is great, reception is great, has all the features you could need or want and it looks good too. The QWERTY pad is nice sized and easy to use. There have been issues with the recent updates though too, so if you are buying this phone soon, or have bought one recently DO NOT UPDATE YET UNTIL THEY WORK OUT ALL THE BUGS! The update is bricking some phones and renders most capabilities useless when it doesn't completely brick it.
UPDATE All issues were resolved with some simple settings tweaks. The phone has been great and was well worth the money. Nokia phones are so durable and reliable the problem we were having was due to it being unlocked and not properly setup for our carrier so it was our own fault. I should have updated sooner. This phone also does not require us to have a data plan with ATT, which is a huge plus! Not too many nice phones out there to buy unlocked, with wifi, that do not require a data plan.This is an excellent phone. It has been working perfectly and fulfills all the requirements. The QWERTY keyboard is really nice. Definitely better than I expected. You will not be dissapointed.
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