Review The E75 is the first Nokia smartphone to feature a slide-out Qwerty keyboard and style-wise it would appear to be a sort of cross between the conventionally sliding E66 and the E90 Communicator – the latest incarnation of Nokia's long-established hinged Qwerty-keyboard business phones.

The 2.5in, 320 x 240, 16m-colour screen doesn't measure up to the E90's 800 x 352 beast, but at least it has the advantage of looking like a conventional phone, and Nokia's obviously done some sterling work in keeping it relatively thin - for a keyboard slider, anyway - at 112 x 50 x 14mm. It weighs in at a respectable 139g as opposed to the E90's trouser-straining 210g.

Around the sides are a micro USB port and Micro SD memory card slot - it comes with a 4GB card to boost the phone's 50MB of on-board memory - both covered with rubberised grommets, plus camera shutter and volume buttons, a dedicated voice commands button and a 3.5mm audio jack at the top. Round the back is a lightly ridged metallic cover, similar to the one on the E66, but this time with a 3.2Mp camera with LED flash and self-portrait mirror.

Unusually for a Nokia business phone, there's no infrared port and Nokia has again left off its power button à la the E63 (http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/02/11/review_smartphone_nokia_e63/) – you hold down the call end button, just like almost everyone else's phones these days.

The keypad is a little cramped, especially the three keys right at the bottom, which can be a bit tricky to reach with your thumb. Three of Nokia's standard E-series shortcut keys - home, calendar and messaging - are ranged around the square navpad, but contacts has been replaced with a delete button, which seems an odd choice for a phone with an alphanumeric keyboard, especially since there are a couple of soft-menu keys present, one of which could easily serve as a delete button for when you're punching in phone numbers.

Which brings us neatly to the keyboard. It slides out to the left with a crisp, assisted action. The upper part of the phone feels a little flimsy when the keyboard is exposed - so that's where they've saved the space - but there's no worry that it might snap or anything. It's probably just that we're used to heavier brutes.

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The four-line keyboard is well spaced, but the flat keys, made of rubberised plastic, aren't as tactile and easy to distinguish with your thumbs as, for instance, those on Nokia's E71, or HTC's Qwerty-packing smartphones - such as the S470 (http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/01/23/review_smartphone_htc_s740/) - which have sloping buttons that rise like little hillocks to meet your thumbs.

There's a metal bar running through the middle of the keyboard which appears to be there for support. Besides looking a bit odd, it doesn't get in the way. The keyboard itself is well thought out, with essential keys like '@' and '.' all readily available with a single button press. Numbers, which are ranged along the top line, require an additional press of the Shift key.

The edging doesn't come up to Nokia's usual pernickety standard and the edges of the plastic casing stand slightly proud of the keyboard, so that we found they tended to catch irritatingly on our thumbnails. The model we tried was an early sample, however, so this may be fixed in full production models.

Email, absolutely essential on a phone like this, proved to be easy to set up and use thanks to Nokia Messaging - an update on Nokia Email which is currently free, though Nokia has warned that it may later become part of network charges. It supports Yahoo! Mail and Gmail, among others, and POP and IMAP accounts. You can view email in HTML format and access up to ten different email addresses.

The browser is a good one, with easy options to zoom and search full pages as well as find text, phone numbers or email addresses on web pages.

Fast access is assured with both the HSDPA 3G connection and Wi-Fi, which also proved easy to set up. There's a motion sensor on board to auto-rotate the screen from portrait to landscape, but the E75 will also do this automatically when you open the keyboard. Everything you need for a good browsing experience, in other words.

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The camera, by comparison, is a little less impressive. Hold down the shutter button on the side and it takes a rather tardy four seconds to kick into life. There's none of the Carl Zeiss lens malarkey you get on Nokia's N-series handsets, but it's a competent snapper without much in the way of extras.

Maximum resolution is 2048 x 1536 pixels and there's autofocus, an 8x digital zoom and a red-eye reduction option for the LED flash. You can optimise shooting for movement, landscape and close-ups, plus there's a burst mode which takes six shots in rapid succession and a timer too.

Nokia's photo editing suite isn't present and there are very limited facilities for adjusting your pics – rotate and zoom is all there is, though you can upload snaps to the internet directly using Nokia's Ovi site.

Pics are bright though not especially sharp, and colours aren't what you could call vibrant. Switching to video mode drops the quality to 640 x 480 but it does record at 30f/s, so it's a cut above most basic cameraphone video recorders and you can use the flash as a video light. There's also another camera on the front for video conferencing.

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Traditionally, entertainment isn't seen as a priority for Nokia's business handsets – that's the all-singing, all-dancing N-series' department – but the E75's media player covers all the basics more than well. It can play MP3, WMA, AAC, AAC+ and eAAC+ formats and gives you options to create playlists and download podcasts. You can also view video in Flash, 3GP, H.263, H.264, MPEG 4 VSP, RealVideo and WMV9 formats, all in landscape mode.

The headphones, which have an unusual, braided covering to the wires, are bog standard, quality-wise, and distinctly bright and tinny in tone. There's a very basic, six-preset equaliser to help correct this, though it's easy to add a better set of headphones thanks to the 3.5mm headphone jack. You can also leave the music playing while you perform other tasks, such as creating or viewing QuickOffice documents or reading PDFs, all supported here.

The E75 has one of Nokia very fine FM radios on board with up to 50 station presets as well as an internet radio player though you'd be advised to only use this with a WLAN connection – using it with a mobile connection can deliver some seriously scary data charges.

Other useful items include Assisted GPS with Nokia Maps and, deep in the Media section of the Applications folder, what wonder is this? N-Gage games on a Nokia business phone? Well, lots of business folk seem to have more time on their hands these days…

Battery life wasn't great by Nokia standards, though we still got a good two days of moderate use out of it, with Wi-Fi turned on and a fair bit of browsing and music playing. Call quality was entirely decent.

Verdict

The main disadvantage of the slide-out keyboard is bulk, but this is one of the thinnest we've seen, though some others are a bit easier to use. But with good email and browser services, document creation and viewing, a decent camera and music player, aGPS and N-Gage games, plus access to loads of additional Symbian apps, this all adds up to a very powerful phone both for work and in-between jobs. ®

More Qwerty Phone Reviews...

(http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/02/16/review_smartphone_hp_ipaq_data_messenger/) HP iPaq Data Messenger

(http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/02/11/review_smartphone_nokia_e63/) Nokia E63

(http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/02/02/review_phone_lg_prada_ii/) LG Prada II

(http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/01/23/review_smartphone_htc_s740/) HTC S740