Nokia N75 Review - Features

Features

Features
While the N75 is more or less marketed as a music phone, it is in fact a full on smartphone running Nokia’s Series 60 interface on top of the Symbian OS.  Being an official AT&T handset (my review model has the now-old Cingular branding), the menus and applications differ slightly from what you’ll find on unlocked S60 Nokias -- the most notable change being an entire submenu devoted to Music.  N75 supports a wide variety of media file formats as well as some online music services, but over the air downloads aren’t possible - you’ll have to sideload your music files to the phone from a computer.  CV - AT&T’s new name for “Cingular Video” - is also supported on the phone, allowing access to mobile TV, news, weather, sports, entertainment, and HBO Mobile content in 3G-supported areas.  RealPlayer is also included for playback of video files stored in onboard memory or on microSD cards.

S60 features pretty comprehensive personal information features, and of course is expandable via thousands of user-installable applications.  The onboard contacts manager supports an unlimited number of contacts limited only by available memory.  Contacts may be assigned photo and ringtone IDs.  The phone also ships with a PDF reader and QuickOffice, an MS Office-compatible document viewer; full-on document editors are available as upgrades.  Other productivity tools include a calendar, measurement converter, voice recorder and an application to manage Zip downloads.

In addition to now-standard features like voice command, speed dial, and conference calling, the N75 offers a view interesting goodies.  Message Reader and Voice Aid use text-to-speech technologies to speak things like text messages, recent calls lists, and even contact information to you through the phone’s speakers.  While I put these features in the “neat, even if I never use them again” category, I can see them being quite handy for folks who, say, drive a lot and receive a lot of SMS messages.
 
Camera
 Nokia’s approach to cameras on their high-end phones is truly baffling to me.  On the one hand you’ve got some truly excellent implementations - the 5MP N95 and 3MP N93 and N73 are up there amongst the best cameras you can get on US-compatible phones right now.  So clearly Nokia knows how to get those Carl Zeiss optics working in their handsets.

On the other hand, however, there are a whole bunch of Nokias with cameras that look good on spec sheets but disappoint in real life.  Add the N75 to that list.  It’s 2MP camera with an LED flash assist light, and either the internal or external displays can be used as viewfinders.  But there’s no Carl Zeiss moniker and it produced pretty mediocre images in my testing.  It kind of reminded me of the camera on the E70 - another 2MP shooter that yielded somewhat dull, off-color photos.  I wonder if there really is something to the whole Carl Zeiss thing.  I also wonder why Nokia doesn’t just stick the best optics they have in all their high-end phones and differentiate (i.e. “Up-sell”) based on megapixels and video capture resolution.

The N75 did fare a bit better when it came to moving images.  Video clips captured with the handset  were a bit sharper and generally more pleasing to the eye than still images.  Videos can be captured at an impressive 352 by 288 resolution at 15 frames per second, with audio.

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