Pros Well-built chassis. Spacious and highly thummable QWERTY. Easy to set up
and usepush email service. High-speed connectivity.Integrated 3.5mm headphone
jack
Cons Fingerprint-attractingglossy fascia.Ordinary camera performance.Superfluous
dual homescreen mode.
Traditionally Nokia’s Eseries smartphone range has been aimed squarely at the business user, but last year’s QWERTY-packing E71 and E66 slider both rocked up with slinky designs and multimedia chops that screamed crossover appeal. It latest member, the E75, continues this trend for blurring the lines between business and pleasure.
Yet despite angling for the mainstream acceptance, the Symbian S60 powered E75 is still a business handset at heart. Its design, reminiscent of the E51, is smart rather stylish and doesn’t possess the slimline wow factor of the E71. However, like its Eseries compadres, it’s well made with a 139g solid heft and quality metallic rear panelling.
Glossed over
Rather annoyingly, the E75 continues Nokia’s penchant for overly glossy finishes, so finger print smears blot the fascia. Another small gripe is the cramped soft/call and one-touch shortcut key cluster around the navi-pad that will have our fat-fingered friends cursing. Otherwise, the phone proved fantastic to use.
The E75 isn’t the most svelte of phones, mainly because it’s the first of the Eseries stable to pack a sliding QWERTY keyboard. The spring heeled and robust slider mechanism opens to reveal a flatbed but roomy thumb-friendly keyboard. The display is also quick to orientate itself to landscape mode when the keyboard is nudged into action.
Start pushing
Nokia’s new Messenger service is also onboard, rivalling BlackBerry’s push email setup in every respect. Setting up your personal email clients is a cinch – just enter your address and password and it will do the rest– and you can add up to 10 accounts. Of course, corporate sets up like Microsoft Mail for Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes Traveler are also supported.
Nokia still persists with its mode switch to toggle between work and personal homescreens and the jury is still out to whether we need this feature. Still, if you really require that work/home separation then it could prove useful.
Listen with headphones
The E75’s multimedia set up is similar to the E71’s bar a few new additions. The most noticeable and welcome is the integrated 3.5mm headphone jack. Plug in your own quality earphones and the capable music player sounds dynamic and highly listenable and with a link to Nokia’s Music Store you can download tunes direct from the handset.
The VGA-quality video recording frame rate has been boosted from 22fps of the E71/E66 to 30fps and delivers decent footage. Similarly, the autofocus-driven 3.2MP camera is OK rather than class leading but will be adequate for most users. And just to emphasise the E75 has fully embraced the multimedia life, it now supports N-Gage gaming.
Road worthy
While its camera and video performance creaked a little, the E75 has nose for navigation. Sniffing out a GPS fix was almost instantaneous and with Nokia Maps 2.0 embedded and three-month trial thrown in for gratis, it proved an adept guide. With 7.2Mbps-flavoured HSDPA and built-in Wi-Fi at the helm, full-fat web surfing was also hassle free, especially if you opt for the fantastic onboard Opera Mini browser.
If you still like the traditional phone format but need that full QWERTY for messaging then the E75 is currently your best bet. It’s all round messaging and multimedia performance was hard to fault and is welcome addition to the Eseries clan.
1 comments:
Great blog.
I own both the Nuvi 660 and the 760, I'm writing this review for people having trouble deciding between the two as the price difference between the two products at the time of this review is about 100 dollars. I'm not going to focus on the feature differences, as that information can be easily obtained from specifications and online reviews. The 660 was a fine product back in 2005-2006, but the new 760 outdoes the 660 in practically everything, but there are some key usability fixes that make the 760 a better buy for the frequent user.
http://tinyurl.com/gnuvi760
1. 760 has much better fonts for street names than the 660. This may seem like a trivial update to some, but the 760's fonts greatly improve visibility. The 660 uses all capitalized text for street names on the map, and the font is incredibly cartoonish and unaligned, something like the scribbling Comic Sans font on the PC. The 760 uses your standard Verdana-like font with street names in capitalized and lowercase letters. The fonts on the 760 are smaller, cleaner and surprisingly much easier to read while driving. The maps end up looking professional, and not some cartoony children's video game.
2. 760 has better rendering in 3D map mode than the 660. In the 660 when you are zoomed in under 3D map mode, the roads close to your car are displayed incredibly large, so large that they run into other roads, making the zoom function essentially kind of useless for dense roads. The 760 does not oversize your roads just because you zoomed in to view smaller roads in detail. This fix is very nice for those who drive in places with dense roadways, like New York City.
3. No antenna on the 760 makes hooking up your Nuvi to the cradle one step easier. On the 660 you need to flip up the antenna before attaching the cradle. For people who park their cars on the street overnight, removing the GPS from the cradle for storage in the console or glove compartment is a must, and it's a lot easier hooking up the 760 to the cradle than the 660. It's hard to aim the 660 to its cradle in the dark as you have to align both the bottom edge and the charge port under the antenna. In the 760, the charge port is directly on the bottom of the unit; you can attach it to the cradle with one hand in the dark easily on the 760.
4. It takes the 660 a good 45 seconds on average (sometimes longer than 2 minutes) after boot up to locate the satellite on a cold start. If you have firmware 2.6 installed on the 760, the satellite acquisition time after boot up is between 10-20 seconds. After the firmware update, my 760 also holds a stronger lock to the satellites than my 660, I can get satellite lock inside my house with the 760, whereas I can't get a lock with my 660 (adjusting the antenna does very little).
5. The ability to set multiple ad hoc viapoints on the 760 means it's a lot easier creating alternate routes (very handy to avoid a specific interstate or a high traffic road). Whereas the 660 gives you just one viapoint.
UPDATE: This GPS is currently on sale at Amazon… now is your chance to buy one, if you haven’t already. You can find the product page here:
http://tinyurl.com/gnuvi760
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