Unbound Mobile

I wrote two months ago about my issues with the iPhone and it came down to the lack of a good camera as my major gripe. My usage type falls right between content creator and content consumer. Before the 3G and arguably still with the 3GS, the iPhone was positioned as a media consumption device. Anyone who wanted to create real media on a mobile looked to the venerable s60 platform and the N Series. That line began to blur as I sat and listened to the WWDC keynote in Moscone West. Perhaps it was the reality distortion field in full effect or maybe it was the promise of a 3mp camera in the iPhone. Either way I had two weeks to wait for the release of the iPhone. Surely that was enough time to find the iPhone’s faults and stick with my 5800. Two weeks came and I was still tempted by the iPhone, more so by its presence as a platform than as a phone.  I decided to pick one up and for the past two months I have barely touched my 5800 or any S60 phone for that matter.

That changed when I got an email from WOMworld offering me an E75 to demo for three weeks.  The E75 is a business oriented smart phone with a slide out horizontal QWERTY.  I won’t bother giving you a full review because you can read those here, here and here.  Here are the major points I found with the E75 over the past 3 weeks.

The Nokia E75 and its QWERTY Keyboard - Flickr

Pros

• Software: It has been a while since I used a non-touch version of S60.  This phone comes with S60v3 FP2 which is very well polished.  Despite S60 catching a lot a flack lately for looking outdated, this mature platform knows how to get things done.  The menu received a new icon set and minor organizational changes with the addition of a “Control Panel” for phone settings.
• Email: One of the biggest draws to this phone is the integration of Nokia’s messaging service which allows multiple email accounts to be checked via the messaging application.  This replaces the aging email client that used to ship with S60 phones.  You are also able to quickly switch between multiple mailboxes.  The iPhone requires about 5 “clicks” to switch.  On the e75 a quick pulldown menu from any inbox allows you to switch to another.  The addition of Nokia Messaging into the messaging app allows for home screen notifications of all your email accounts.
• Home screen: The home screen now sports new message counts for your email accounts, and missed call, voicemail and SMS counts.  It is a nice addition to the non-touch version of S60 making the home screen a very powerful place.  This is one of the big things I miss on the iPhone.

Cons

• Keyboard: Coming from the iPhone and the 5800 I found the keyboard difficult to get used to.  The keys are very flat and it is difficult to know where you are  about to click.
• Shortcut Buttons.  The Buttons that surround the 4 way are all double function.  The right and left side do different things but occupy the same button.  This caused me to miss click so many times it nearly drove me mad.
• Camera: This is a very minor gripe.  The camera’s quality is pretty sub par.  Both the 5800 and the iPhone take much better images.  The phone is marketed as a business phone and its focus is messaging so a nice camera isn’t a deal breaker.
• HTML Email: This Nokia phone features a built in email client that supports HTML email, but I feel it fails in implementation.  When you click a message you will need to click a second time to load the HTML version of the message.  Why?  I had already set it to download the HTML version automatically, just show it to me. The iPhone does this beautifully.
• Web Browser: The built-in S60 browsers is ok.  It supports flash and will render most websites.  It is a bit slow to render and you can’t navigate pages during the process. The good thing about S60 is that you have a bunch of choices in third party browsers such as Opera or SkyFire.

Cool Trick

• When in QWERTY mode you can copy and paste using desktop keyboard commands crtl + C and V to copy and paste.