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Video: Nokia E75 (Proto) Quick Overview


Nokia E75 (Proto) Quick Overview from Jonathan Greene on Vimeo.

The Nokia E75 was announced officially at Mobile World Congress recently and I’ve been fortunate to have been playing with a near release prototype of the Nokia E75 for a few weeks.

The Nokia E75 is the first Eseries device to support tri-band HSDPA and Quad Band EDGE which enables it to really cover the needs of the global traveler. I’ve used it with both TMO and ATT sim cards and found that I was able to find 3.5G signals without issues on both sides of the Atlantic. The E75 is also the first Eseries to run Feature Pack 2 which offers key some UI enhancements as well as the all important non-destructive system updates.

As you can see in the video, the E75 offers two modes of operation and let’s you choose between the standard number pad / T9 and a very full QWERTY keypad which slides out from the side. The screen auto-rotates when you open the keypad and maintains the state (as expected) of whatever operation you might have been in the midst of trying to complete. I found the keyboard to be very easy to use and would consider it one of the easier keyboards to use on the various mobile devices I’ve tried.

Nokia Messaging is integrated into the E75 and as you can see it can handle both Mail For Exchange along with your personal email accounts. I’ve been using both my work exchange account and Gmail with full push running all day. The 1000Mah battery can easily deal with this as well as my general usage which consists of email, web, maps and Joikuspot though I tend to recharge after a Joikuspot (on all devices) to make sure I can get through the day.

The E75 should will be a great device when it’s officially released later this quarter and I expect it to be very popular for people looking for a highly capable smartphone.

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Nokia Messaging Gets an Update

I’ve been using Nokia Messaging since the summer across my devices and it’s definitely worth an install if you are looking for a push-like email experience.  The latest update to the service offers a tweak to your settings giving you more control on the handset as well as supporting the just announced Eseries devices.

The Nokia Messaging team has released a patch for Nokia Messaging that is available now at email.nokia.com. This patch does a few nice things, including returning APN selection in the client, the addition of the E75 and E55 to the Nokia Messaging family, and upgrading our notification system for Yahoo! Mail users. [via S60 Blogs]

If you use an Eseries device like the E71 I carry, you can get an additional mailbox on your homescreen for a dashboard into your messaging which is excellent.  All handsets benefit from the web based configuration though which lets you define your mailboxes and then have Nokia Messaging send you a configuration message which activates mail on your device.

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Mail for Exchange is NOT enterprise ready

I’ve had Mail for Exchange running on my E71 for about 6 months now … essentially since I got it over the summer. In that time, I have had to either create new a profile or re-install the application dozens of times. For some reason the my profile data seems to get lost and the E71 stops syncing with Exchange.

I’m not clear on what causes this problem and I’ve seen it across two versions of Mail for Exchange as well as firmware updates for the E71. I know this is a DIY Solution rather than something implemented (or required) by IT so I’m somewhat on my own, but our IT team has also seen the same things. We use Exchange 2007 and there are never issues like this with Blackberries in the company.

This type of application / service needs to just work. Once configured there should not be any thought required other than how well and consistently it syncs.