The Cell Phones Blog: Cellphones: Nokia N75 Review and Gallery: Hands on the First Official N-Series

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May 04, 2007

Cellphones: Nokia N75 Review and Gallery: Hands on the First Official N-Series

This morning, I woke up to find a virginal Nokia N75, still in its shrink wrap, delivered to my waiting arms, waiting to be unpacked, clicked through and reviewed. A refresher for those of you who haven't been paying attention: The series 60 Symbian phone is notable because it's the first N-series Nokia to be picked up by a US carrier, it takes advantage of Cingy's UMTS 850 / 1900 to rock 3G speeds, and it's packed with the N-series multimedia goodness like the 2MP camera, 352 x 288 pixel video cam. It's a potent handset, and you should be glad it's here in the US and not yet another business oriented smartphone. Like its bigger brother, there are endless lists of features worth knowing about: In fact, it has most of the main features the N95 does, minus the more potent camera and GPS, and video podcasts. But with 3G network speeds, and a somehow snappier feeling OS. And it's subsidized at $200 after $50 rebate, with a 2-year contract, so it's about 1/4 the price of the N95 flagship. Before you dive into the gallery tour below, you'll be happy to know this: Even though carriers have traditionally been pretty scared of the openness and power of the N-series Nokia phones, Cingular hasn't neutered the N75's smartphone-ness. Here's a gallery of the hardware, screenshots, and even some sample shots taken with the camera phone. And here's a complete rundown of what the powerful phone has to offer: Sure the menus are tarted up with Cingular branded stores and many of the powerful apps, like the Office doc readers, are really trial ware. But you can go ahead and install your J2ME and S60 apps, like the Google Maps, GMail, Shozu, and Opera browser we did. And you can transfer to and browse the file system over Bluetooth. The music section, which the N95 doesn't have, is particularly interesting. There's a pay per month service for identifying music (ala Sony Ericsson's Free TrackID). And a link to the Yahoo Unlimited Music Store, which didn't work (despite the link on the phone, you can only sideload.) The link to the nav software was borked, too. (Maybe full N75 network support goes live tomorrow.) Here's a list of the mountain of functions the phone has: Main Menu Video Download (Browser linked to Real player, free clips) Messaging (SMS, TXT) Call Log MEdia Net (Browser) Mall (Buy media crap) Music (Interesting music app menu) My Stuff (Media Gallery for images, music and vids) Address book Games and Apps IM & EMail (Email: Bellsouth, AT&T, Yahoo, AOL, AIM, MSN. Chat: AIM, MSN, Yahoo, with logging) Tools Notes Clock Camera Voice Recorder Calendar Web Browser Tutorial Flash Player Calculator Adobe PDF Reader Quick Office (Trialware for office format reader) Zip Utility Converter Help About Radio Realplayer Settings Speed Dial Voice Mail Transfer (From one symbian phone to another) Profiles Config Voice Command 3d Tones Themes Voice Aid Infrared Bluetooth Data Cable Modes File Manager App Manager Memory Manager Connection Manager Speech Msg Reader Dev. Manager Sync Music Music (files, playback) Music ID (Subscription, $4 a month) MobiRadio Shop Music (Seems useless) Music Videos (Ditto) Billboard (More content) Community Music Apps (store) Games and Apps (this is where your j2me and S60 apps show up after you've installed them) Lifeblog (uploads all your images and text to a typepad blog, over the network) Ebay Trial (Ebay app) Lumines Tetris 3d Pool MobiTV And all the other apps I installed. The speakers are tooth sized, but super loud. And the camera needs a lens cover, because when it get dirty, shots end up looking terrible. But clean 2mp shots are great, if not a little grainy compared to a full digicam. Best results occur when you're using the shot mode, white balance, or flash. The video/image modes are annoying to switch between. And I like the sequence/time lapse mode. (See the samples in my gallery.) Overall, good job Cingular for not messing up a good thing. I highly recommend this phone. '" Brian Lam N75 [Nokia]