Nokia E75: A balance between business and personal use

Nokia E75

Nokia's latest E Series handset, the Nokia E75, is designed to fit somewhere between the needs of heavy business and an active personal life, with a balance clearly shown in its weight and slimmer, more comfortable dimensions.

The E75 has a side-out full QWERTY keyboard with 39 keys and is also equipped with a secondary numeric keyboard. The 2.4-inch TFT screen boasts a 16-million-colour display with 240 x 320-pixel resolution.

The handset has a standard set of connectors and slots, including a micro-USB and memory card slot on the left side, a 3.5mm jack on top and a charger connection at the bottom end. The device has no stereo speakers.

The E75's connection features include HSDPA, WLAN 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0, and built-in GPS with A-GPS. It comes with a 3.2-Megapixel camera.

It is available in silver black, copper yellow and red colours.

The E75's highlight feature is its new e-mail user interface, offering full desktop e-mail functionality - including expanding views, one-click reply and subfolder and HTML support. It also features complete e-mail integration - including Yahoo Mail, Gmail, Windows Live Hotmail, and Nokia's corporate e-mail clients Mail for Exchange and IBM Lotus Notes Traveller - as well as Nokia Messaging.

The Messaging application will not only send and receive e-mail messages, but also text, multimedia and audio messages.

Business users can opt for Nokia's mobile virtual private network (VPN) client to create a secure connection to a compatible company intranet and services. To browse their company's intranet, they must first create a company-specific VPN policy, then install and configure the VPN client, certificates and policies.

They can also work with documents, spreadsheets, and presentations with the Quickoffice application, which can open message and e-mail attachments, view DOC, XLS, and PPT files, and enable editing and creation of new files.

Quickoffice consists of Quickword for Microsoft Word documents, Quicksheet for Microsoft Excel spreadsheets, Quickpoint for Microsoft PowerPoint presentations and Quickmanager for purchasing software.

The E75 also provides an improved calendar capability with contacts and task management.

Maps and GPS are other features of the E75. With the Maps application and a GPS connection, users can find their location or measure distances and coordinates. They can also search for specific places such as restaurants, tourist attractions, shops and stations.

The handset also supports assisted GPS (A-GPS), which is a network service for navigation and possibly geo-tagging. When A-GPS is activated, the device receives satellite information from an assistance data server over the cellular network.

Users need to select an Internet access point for downloading maps. If they browse to an area that is not covered by the maps already downloaded to the device, a map for the area is automatically downloaded through the Internet. Nokia Map Loader PC software can also be used to find software from http://maps.nokia.com, with which to download maps.

The Nokia E75 promises to be a good option for those wanting a balance between business and personal use. It will be officially introduced to the Thailand market this week, at a price of Bt17,500 (including VAT).