Nokia E75 review: Business on the slide

Symbian S60 UI now comes with Feature Pack 2

Nokia E75 runs on Symbian 9.3 OS with the Series60 3rd Edition user interface. It has Feature Pack 2, unlike the Nokia E71 which only had the major features of Feature Pack 2 ported for the FP1. Frankly speaking, in normal use you won't find much difference between the two.

The Nokia E75 is powered by a 369 MHz CPU. In Symbian smartphone terms this means that navigating the menus is pretty fast with instant response to key presses and no delays whatsoever.

Nokia E75 runs on Symbian S60 3.2

The E75 comes with the new S60 icons, similar to the one found on the 5th edition and brings some new accelerometer-based functionality. This includes automatic rotation of the display plus silencing calls and snoozing the alarm by flipping your phone over or tapping the display. The extended number of settings for the slider is also a nice addition but that almost completes the list.

The accelerometer sensor has a number of settings

The phone's main menu has two view modes: a 4 x 3 grid of icons and a list. However with the E75 you cannot opt for having animated icons as with some other Nokia phones. This is probably just another way of reiterating the specific business focus of the phone. At least the font size is configurable depending on your preferences.

The main menu has two view modes

You can also switch between portrait and landscape orientation for every menu by either opening and closing the slider or by using the accelerometer. Please bear in mind that the accelerometer is disabled by default so you will have to turn it on from the setting menu in order to use it.

Almost every part of the interface has a landscape mode too

The circle next to the icon of a running application is a well known Symbian indication reminding users to quit unwanted applications that are still running in the background.

The active stand-by mode goes without saying on the Nokia E75. This is a convenient way to add shortcuts to all your favorite applications on the home screen. You can even assign shortcuts to websites of your choice for quicker access. In addition you can bring up to 14 different kinds of notifications starting from email boxes and voice mail through calendar and to-dos to Music player and FM radio currently running track. How many of those 14 get displayed is completely up to you.

Basic, active or talking stand-by theme

Both of the one-touch keys (messaging and calendar) can be customized to access any feature (actually two per key) of choice. The two soft keys functions can also vary.

If for some reason the active stand-by mode isn't your cup of tea you can revert to the basic theme or switch to the new talking theme. The basic theme allows you to assign shortcuts to the directions of the D-pad while the talking theme…well, it talks. It brings four shortcuts to your homescreen and tells you what the currently selected one is. Once you enter any of the menus, it tells you which menu you have opened and sometimes gives you some extra useful information about it. For example, when you enter the clock application, it tells you the current time.

The talking theme has its own clock application

This talking theme is pretty comfortable for working with without looking at the phone. It might be a good idea to activate it when using the phone while driving for example and save yourself some needless distraction.

Another cool feature of ther recent E-series handsets allows you to toggle between two different phone setups. Each of them can be customized with its own theme and homescreen applications for maximum usability. In this way you can have both a leisure and a business profile and alternate between them with a single click.

The built-in memory is 85MB, which is a decent amount. The included 4GB microSD memory card comes in very handy for extending it, but even higher capacity cards are supported.

As we managed to confirm, Nokia E75 has no problem handling a 16GB microSD card, which is the largest currently available on the market. Accessing applications or any other files on the memory card is quick and you probably won't notice any difference compared to accessing ones in the phone memory.

As with any Symbian phone, there is a built-in voice recognition system. It is launched by the dedicated key on the side of the E75 and it does a good job, being fully speaker-independent and recognizing a very high percentage of the user commands.

And finally, there's a nice security feature from the E71 and E66 known as Remote Lock. It's not a new feature per se, but up until now it was usually reserved for corporate scenarios. Now it's available to everyone.

If your Nokia E75 gets stolen or lost, you simply send a coded SMS message to remotely lock the phone. After three unsuccessful attempts of to unlock it, it wipes itself clean of all personal or sensitive info. You might not get your Nokia E75 back, but at least nobody will get your personal data either.

The customization options for the user interface of the Nokia E75 are mainly restricted to its functionality out of the box. In stark contrast to the huge amount of customizable notifications, there are only two different visual themes preinstalled on the handset. So if you are into changing those icons and colors you will have to download new ones from the internet….but don't worry, there's plenty to choose from out there.