NOKIA has produced two excellent and deservedly popular business-minded mobiles in recent years. The E51 is a solid yet stylishly compact "candy bar" handset with a standard alphanumeric keypad, while the E71 (and the more budget-minded E63, for that matter) has a large square screen and qwerty keyboard.

With the new E75, Nokia has borrowed a little from each of them while adding some new twists to the mobile mix. Foremost is the new Nokia Messaging service, which delivers BlackBerry-style email.

This works across a refreshingly broad range of email services from web-based email such as Google and Windows Live Hotmail, plus ISPs including BigPond, OptusNet, iiNet and Internode. Nokia has streamlined the set-up process for all these so that there's minimal pain - you need only enter your email address and password.

Adding an account from your company's exchange server or a different ISP is more complex but the result is the same - instant delivery of messages to your mobile phone as soon as they hit the mail server.

The email software itself is much improved over Nokia's previous efforts, although there's no single integrated view of emails - each account gets its own inbox. And while you can have as many as 10 of these, the E75's home screen shows only two of those: the ones designated as your primary and secondary accounts.

Dealing with message attachments sent via email is a bit hit-and-miss. PDF files and Excel spreadsheets were easily viewed but some Word documents came through with odd formatting - such as every word in bold-face red type - while others were almost illegible, even though they used Microsoft's long-standing DOC format.

Downloading a free update to the E75's QuickOffice software enabled viewing of Word documents in the Office 2007 format but didn't resolve the other issues. We'd suggest testing the E75 with your own office software and the most commonly emailed documents before you sign on the dotted line.

Another unique trait of the E75 is that it sports both alphanumeric and qwerty keyboards. Hold it vertically and it's just like any candy-bar phone, although the 1.5cm profile and 140g weight belie the sheer heft of the robust stainless-steel chassis.

Swing the E75 into a horizontal position and a full qwerty keypad slides out, while the 6cm display, navigation button and shortcut menus all automatically reorient into landscape mode.

The keys are flat, large and well spaced but perhaps too much so - bashing out emails on the compact and slightly cambered keyboard of the E71 or BlackBerry Bold proved much faster.

The slider mechanism itself also needs work: even when closed there's a disconcerting amount of wobble and that's inconsistent with the E75's otherwise exceptional build quality. The web browser remains second-rate - no smartphone can yet match Apple's iPhone in this area - but it's enough for a quick news or sport update through any mainstream site. Happily, there's almost no lag when flicking through menus and switching between programs.

The rest of the E75's features lean towards being par for a high-end smartphone: high-speed 3G and Next G (it's also compatible with 3's dual-network Mega 3 service), Wi-Fi and an inbuilt GPS receiver. Creature comforts for downtime include a capable music player with a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, support for Nokia's N-Gage mobile games and an FM radio.

source:- http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2009/05/18/1242498695492.html