Nokia N75 Review

I was waiting for the perfect time to start blogging, although hopefully I can pick up the pace once I get to sort out my schedule. This review has been put together after a week's usage.

Initial Impression:

    Based on what I've seen before in the pictures and videos taken of the Nokia N75, I didn't think that it would appeal to me aesthetically. The keypad looked decent, and with me having large fingers, I couldn't resist the chance. 3G here in Los Angeles has been expanding in the past few months, but still doesn't reach my house (5-6 miles more to go), but I thought I could get a chance to test out the speeds when I'm in a 3G area to see if 3G really makes a difference on a cell phone. So once I got one unit, and I held the phone, it was better than I expected. The front of the phone is a little boring, but from the sides it actually looks nice. When the phone is open, it looks relatively thin. I was baffled by the tiny speakers Nokia placed on the two sides of the phone, however as you will read later on, there almost up to par with the speakers of the N73. The hinge also feels almost rock-solid, and all you need to do is get it half way open, and it will do the job. When the flip is open, it has two small pads on the bottom of the keypad, and it seems all it does is it creates a little separation between the keypad and the flip when it's closed, so that a fingernail can get in between easier to open the phone.

When I opened the flip, the phone seemed too long at the beginning, but I got used to it quickly. The power button is more recessed and a little bit smaller than the N73, so if you want to change profiles using the power button, it might be more bothersome. (remember I have large fingers) There is a bug with Lock phone, and that once the phone is locked and the flip is closed, once the flip is opened again, it shows the active standby, which isn't a big deal, but some people who receive emails or have some tasks shown on the main menu might be concerning. The battery compartment comes off effortlessly, which I don't know if it is necessary a good thing or not, but at least it would make sure if the phone is dropped, the battery pops out from there to prevent damage to the headset. It's hard to miss the camera lens in the back, but it is prone to scratches or at least smugging from the fingers, which brings down the picture output quality. The phone feels solid in my hand, and my unit doesn't have any squeaky sounds. For some reason this N75 is labeled as N75-3 in the battery compartment, and until this time, I haven't heard of any other variants to this model. Placing and removing the SIM card is a challenge. It is almost impossible to pull out the SIM card without the help of a pair of tweezers. The phone in the closed mode didn't have any screen savers configured, which sometimes would give me a false alarm that my phone is off until I fixed it later.

Operating phone in closed mode:

    First off for the people who are interested, yes the phone does stand on all sides by itself with minimum effort, therefore taking pictures and videos by leaving it on a desk or shelf is easy.

    The stand by display shows battery life, RF reception, alpha tag, which profile activated, clock, any feature that is turned on (bluetooth, voicemail, and more), and also a playlist on the left soft key (or rewind button), and a play now button which brings you to the last song that was played. The three keys operate in the same matter as if the phone was open, having a left and right soft key, and a middle key which all 3 have illumination. The volume button usually can be used to scroll through lists, which I found for the most part convenient. Also as if the phone was already open, you can use the right soft key (FF key) to activate voice dialing, which is useful to make quick and simple changes to the state of the phone without opening it. You can also lock the keypad from the outside by first hitting the left soft key followed by the right soft key. The media button also activates the calendar, shows you the month, and highlights the current day. However I found this to have a bug, and that is once touch activates the calendar, the next one blanks the screen only leaving the theme, and then another hit brings back the standby menu. Also the screen saver was not activated out of the box, so I had to do that manually. As with candy bar phones, you can select if it wants to show text or time. The calendar from the Handy Clock didn't work on the outside screen when it went to screen saver mode. The type of clock shown also depends if you chose an analog or digital clock. The clock shown is bigger and clearer than the clock in screen saver mode of the N73, even though the outside screen is smaller. The outer display also shows text messages received, and can display it if it's plain text.

Now we come to the music controls. Once the music is activated, the media button that used to activate the calendar acts as an option button, which gives you the home page of the music library, so songs can be chosen based on playlists, genre, artists, and etc. From there you can choose the left soft key for options, which provides you with the basics of shuffle and repeat, with no equalizer choices. The menus can be scrolled with the volume keys. The camera button in the music player doesn't do anything, which I wished they could have gave it a functionality. The outside display doesn't show album art, however it only shows moving bars. which is a nice touch. When the phone goes on screen saver while playing music, at the bottom of the screen it also displays the name of the song. The volume output is surprisingly loud, even from those tiny speakers. There is minor distortion at high volume levels.

The camera operation in this mode is also convenient. You can switch between Image mode and Video mode by pressing the media button, which changes quicker than the N73. The left soft key (or holding it horizontally, the bottom soft key) activates the settings for adjusting the size of the picture and other administrative settings, and the middle key (play/pause key) brings up the photo preferences. The camera in this mode can also be held in stand by mode if left idling. Zoom is achieved with the volume keys, and pictures are snapped with picture key. From the moment the picture key is held, until the camera is ready is about 3 seconds in closed mode, which is decent for S60 v3 phones. If phone is placed on silent, it CAN take silent pictures.

Operating phone in Open mode:

    The first thing that caught my intention when I looked at the screen is I saw that the phone is trying to make a data connection, using the same notification underneath the RF bar that other Nokia phones use. The icon doesn't have solid lines. I have tried killing the connection by holding the End Call key, however it is not possible to do that.

Holding the menu key also shows that the music library is active, and there is no simple way to turn it off.

The screen is nice and relatively bright. However I noticed that it is a tad bit more difficult to read the content on the phone in direct sunlight than the N73. The D-pad is also responsive, however I wished that the center button was more concave so that it could be easier pressed. The placement of the pen and C button are convenient as well. The best part of they keypad is of course the numerical pad, which is excellent for sending text messages via T9, one of the best I've used. The phone CANNOT activate the silent profile by holding the # key. The phone, as with previous N-series models, comes equipped with a light sensor, which turns off the keypad lighting during bright conditions.

The speed of the menu has improved to some part, but it does some occasional hiccups. The phone showed that it started up with ~20MB of RAM via Tasky, however it decrease to ~10 MB of RAM.The other change to this phone was the change in names of some of the applications and folder names. Contacts had become Address book, Tools have become Settings, Settings have become Configuration, and etc. The most annoying change to me is the renaming of the gallery to My Stuff. My Applications and games are also my stuff, but they are not in that folder.

Here I'll be mentioning new features that have been added in each section.

For Messaging, there is a new option for sending text messages called Postcards. Basically it's a Text message with picture, that can be sent to the recipient with a physical mailing address for a fee that is charged by the carrier.

The My Stuff (the old Gallery) displays the images and videos by default is in a portrait display as opposed to the N73. This seems a bit odd, because pictures and videos are taken in landscape, so one would normally assume they can view the album in landscape as well. Fortunately it can be changed to landscape and the change remains.

The music player has been retouched, and now supports album art. It is also now easier to play, pause, stop, rewind and fast forward just be pressing the D-pad in a certain direction in contrast to scrolling to the function and choosing it as in the N73. The fonts are also bolder and easier to read. However the N75 doesn't show the next song that is going to be played, which is unfortunate, and also has lost the ability to launch the Tone Downloads from the player. There also appears to be two version of the music player, one embedded in the My Stuff, and one in the Music icon in the main menu. The one in My Stuff doesn't allow for adjusting the equalizer, and settings for shuffle and repeat and etc.

The only setting that the options key provide for the My Stuff player is setting the current song as the ring tone, which because of Cingular's restrictions, no file over 600 KB can be used as a ringtone. I don't see the reason why Nokia or for that matter Cingular would want to create two different music players, just a waste of ROM resources. The Music Player in the Music section offers greater control than the original music player by adding audio settings during playback, which can shift the balance between the two speakers, adding Stereo widening, and Loudness. Stereo widening adds more space to the music, while Loudness seems to filter some of the noise at higher volumes. Also there is a visualization option, that can either display an album art if available, or can activate the oscilloscope. On both visualizations, it only shows the visualization and the track name.

The address book has a new feature that shows the amount of memory dedicated and available for contacts which can be found in Check Memory. It seems that it has a maximum capacity of 7662 KB. I don't know where this number has come from, but it can't be a good sign, as in previous phones, the Contacts capacity was only limited by the available phone memory left.

The games and applications folder have been merged together, which for a person who has many apps and games could be bothersome. Lumines, Tetris, and 3D Pool Hall are trial games. Perhaps Cingular has pressured Nokia to leave out Snakes, one of the best games for S60. The only "free" application here is Lifeblog.

In the IM department, it seems that Nokia's default IM has been replaced with one that comes pre-configured for AIM, Yahoo!, and MSN. When I tried chatting with the Yahoo! account, it would send the data messages quickly to a Yahoo! Messenger running on a PC, but sending from the PC to the phone took more than 90 seconds, which really defeats the point of running an IM if it takes so long to exchange messages. I felt that Cingular could have kept the Push-To-Talk function from Nokia, since they have that implemented on their network. Looks like they don't have high hopes for it.

The Mobile Email app also includes both the plain Yahoo! and Yahoo! AT&T mail, both AOL and AIM mail, Hotmail, and BellSouth. Although personally I don't use GMail, I don't know why this popular email client hasn't been installed. The fonts are not that big, and they are skinny, so it might be a little painful while reading through the headers.

The old Office folder has become the new Tools folder. This menu includes Real Player and Radio. However the Radio can 't be used out of the box because the handsfree is not included in the retail box. Based on many state laws here in the US, driving while holding a handheld is or is becoming illegal. After all this is a N-series Nokia phone, it's supposed to be the cream of the crop, for both Nokia and Cingular. I mean in their leaked documents it has been dubbed a music phone, so where is the handset? Real Player has a new minor feature buried deep within its settings to adjust the contrast.

In the settings folder, some of the E-series features have been added, like Voice Aid, Speech Language and Message Reader. There is a bug in Voice Aid, because of what I mentioned earlier the some of the folder names have been changed, the Voice Aid says "Contacts" when Address Book is highlighted, and no one else is to blame but Cingular. Also if an am/pm time system is used, the Voice Aid only says the time itself out loud in the Clock menu, not the am/pm accompanied with it. It had no problem when the time was set for 24 hour system. The internal memory showed right after starting up for the first time that about 22 MB of memory was already occupied, which indicates too much branding by Cingular, and from what I've heard, once a master reset is performed, many of these branding and some applications are removed.Also the infrared Modem and Download applications in the N73 are no where to be seen on the N75.

Going to configuration, in the phone settings, it allows a great deal of customization for the Cover Display. The rest is standard as seen on other 3rd edition S60.

In the network setting, as it is custom with Cingular and their branding, not only did they remove the choice of performing a manual scan of mobile operators, they also disabled the opportunity to choose the type of network (GSM or UMTS) on the phone, therefore no battery saving measurements can be done in this section.

Operation of the phone:

The phone's reception is on the good side. I found that it can still hold a voice conversation in a moving elevator, even though it's down to the last bar. The N73 couldn't even do that. However it falls short of the E50 I tried which could easily hold a voice connection with 4-5 bars and minimum sound distortion. I tested the 3G twice in an interesting way. I went to dslreports.com/mspeed while driving through a 3G area at 75-80 mph, and I got a result of 366Kbps with 0.618 s latency, which is good for starters. The other test was similar in results. The earpiece is loud, though a tiny bit muffled. Speaker phone is also plenty loud. For some weird reason, even when I have full reception, the phone drops calls. This has happened at least 4 times during the last week. A future firmware update must address this problem. On the battery side of the issue, the battery life lasts about 1.5 days on moderate usage about 1.5-2 hours of calling, 30-60 minutes Google Maps, logging in to check email twice a day, and maybe listen to some music for 30 minutes.

Comments

[Travis]

I noticed that your phone has app icons across the top when the phone is opened. Is this something you added because mine does not show that.

[Eric]

It's called active standby. It's a option in your settings option.