Introduction

My phones had traditionally been hand-me-downs, ending up with a Samsung A800 black & white flip phone. After been given a Blackberry 8800 by work I decided to get a personal smartphone. I went for the with Nokia E75 primarily because of the slide-out QWERTY keyboard. One thing I discovered with the 8800 was that I was more likely to send SMS messages or use the phone in general because of the full keyboard as I've never got on with predictive text.

Why not...

Form & UI

Size wise, it's perfectly fine and noticeably smaller in the pocket than the 8800. Fitting the slider mechanism into what is an almost normal sized phone is impressive. Build quality is OK so far but a number of demo units in the shops had broken slider mechanisms so we'll see how it lasts.

The keyboard, which was the real selling point of the phone, is decent but in practice not as big a leap over the 8800 as I'd expected. The mechanism is good but as it's quite flat it's hard to find the keys by touch alone, similar to virtual keyboards. It would also benefit from having a Fn (blue key) shift on the right side, as it is you can't use any of the punctuation/numbers on the left hand side without moving a hand. Overall the keyboard is OK for a few sentences, but not much more than that.

The front keypad also suffers from tightly packed, flush keys. A particular problem are the option keys around the navigation pad. Each physical key has two options, linked to the left or right hand side, so you can't just press the key but instead carefully press one side. On the email client the same physical key is delete and navigate back which is a particular odd decision. There's plenty of room to fit two distinct keys in so I can't see the purpose of this. With all the different keys requiring precise activation it's easy to get in a mess and the OS doesn't make it any easier. Whilst trying to answer a call I managed to put the caller on hold and then open my contacts list before I managed to speak to them.

The navigation pad on the front is OK, but not as good as the trackball on the 8800. This matters as it's the most common interface to the phone.

Performance

Speed

There's no getting away with it, it is a slow phone/OS combination. After the e-mail screen redraws you feel like breaking into a little round of applause. For basic usage it's not too much of a problem, but give up on any ideas of running anything demanding like games.

But the biggest problem with general performance isn't the unit itself but the speed of the 3G connection. For all the talk of 3.6 or 7.2mbps at busy times you're lucky to get 0.1mbps, i.e. 10KB/sec. As well as being slow data connections are unreliable, and I've had 200KB downloads freeze and fail to complete. I've tried two networks and performance is much the same. It's real shame, I had geek ambitions of setting up a VPN to my home network over the phone but there's simply no point.

Battery

It's a 3G phone so don't expect to go a week without recharges. In fact you really you want to be charging this every day, and I've bought an extra charger to keep at work. What makes life more difficult is the battery indicator is almost useless. The indicator goes slowly down to 80%, then 50% before dropping to 0 in no time at all.

Web

S60 browser

The built-in browser is based on Webkit and renders a desktop style page which you then scroll around. It does a decent rendering job but it's simply too slow on normal pages although mobile specific pages are OK. Rendering Slashdot with a WiFi connection takes about 20 seconds, and the phone will chug moving around the page afterwards. The other problem is that it isn't very smart in the way it handles slow (3G) connections, so you get the content as plain text which you can start reading but once the stylesheet turns up the text disappears, you wait for the render, and the phone dumps you back at the top of the page.

An annoyance is the bookmarks screen which feature folders for Download Music, Download Videos etc. which you can't delete and those folders contain a link to nokia.com, which you can't delete. This is the kind of pointless self-promotion which would land Microsoft an EU fine in a heartbeat.

When I was using this as the sole browser on the phone I gave up on most pages and relied on RSS feeds instead. The RSS reader is pretty good in that you can flick between stories quickly but doesn't scale images to the screen (and you can't zoom or pan) and I've seen missing/corrupt meta-data from Atom feeds.

Opera Mini

I'll admit, I was snobby about Opera before being a Java applet and all, but overall it's the best browser for the phone and the only way normal browsing is possible. The difference between Opera on the E75 and the default Blackberry browser on the 8800 (admittedly a somewhat older phone) is night and day.

I've tried 4 and 5 beta and the experience is largely the same, 5b fixes some bugs but introduces others. I'll talk about them as a merged entity. Rather than rendering as a desktop would, Opera renders the page with the width of the screen in mind so it's much easy to read columns of text. It's also much faster than the S60 browser both in rendering (Slashdot in 7 seconds) and moving around the page.

On the bad side, it doesn't understand screen rotation so the labels for the two option buttons don't align with the buttons themselves. It also doesn't understand the keyboard where the number keys are Fn shifts of the top line, i.e. the number 1 is selected explicitly as Fn+Q. Do this and Opera brings up the punctuation menu as if it was the number 1 on a keypad. It's also no good for viewing images as everything is down-sampled in quality and you can't zoom in, e.g. for Penny Arcade. Forms can be problematic.

The RSS reader is better than the S60 version in displaying the content, but I missed the click-right to skip story feature.

Skyfire

Skyfire is another off-phone renderer based browser (this time based on the Gecko engine) and uses desktop-style rendering. It doesn't suffer from the keyboard/screen bugs of Opera and you can zoom in on images as you need to. It also includes some serious voodoo by supporting Flash, Quicktime and Silverlight. You can even view iPlayer content... kind-of.

Unfortunately it doesn't work well over 3G connections and you'll wait a long time for it to download blocks of the page as you scroll around. For text-based pages the "thin column" model of Opera works much better. It also struggles to contact the rendering servers.

Email

The email client works, but as previously mentioned is just slow in moving around, slow in connecting. Default rendering is the text of an email, with an option to view the HTML.

The phone comes with a licence for Nokia Messaging, which I think was supposed to be the equivalent of Blackberry push mail. In practice I couldn't find much difference it and the normal email client, other than it's not encrypted and lets someone called Bjorn read all your mail.

Other software

The selection of applications available for S60 is simply not in remotely the same league as the iPhone despite the OS being around for longer. Other than the Web browsers the only other apps I've found of any use are Google Maps and PuTTY. Even the "obvious" apps from the iPhone like TFL status have no equivalent for S60.

VPN

Before I bought the phone I'd heard that the VPN software was rubbish, and it really is. Rather than just letting you choose the settings you have to setup a profile configuration. That requires a piece of desktop software, but even then you can't select the kind of options needed for a home DSL based VPN, instead it seems to be targeted more at big corporate users with Cisco hardware. There are 3rd party products like SymVPN which I haven't tried, but this really should be built-in.

Multimedia

There's a camera apparently, personally I don't care. I suspect the mp3 player works, but I've never tried.