After months and
months of waiting, then the
premature slip on
Cingular/AT&T's Web site, the much-anticipated Nokia N75 is finally available for $199.99 with a two-year contract after rebates. Why so much hype for this phone? Well, there are several reasons, starting with the fact that it's the carrier's first
3G Symbian smart phone. Then you've got the phone's numerous multimedia capabilities, particularly in the music department.
So was it worth the wait? Meh. On the one hand, the N75 offers excellent call quality and snappier performance than other Nokia N series phones. It also boasts a gorgeous internal display, a roomy keypad, and external music controls. However, the N75 disappoints in a number of areas, too. The most alarming is the extremely short talk-time battery life, and its 3G support is UMTS and not HSDPA. Perhaps we're greedy, but when you consider that the carrier's other music phones, such as the Samsung Sync and the Motorola Razr V3xx, offer HSDPA speeds at a lower cost, it makes you pause. As such, if it's a music phone you're after, we recommend the Sync or the V3xx, while if you want the added smart phone capabilities, take a look at the Samsung BlackJack.
Design
The Nokia N75 isn't exactly a stunner in the looks department. The black-and-silver color scheme is classic, but it doesn't have the flash of a Samsung Upstage. Also, at 3.8 inches long by 2 inches wide by 0.8 inch high, the flip phone is a bit blocky and bulky. This makes for a bit of a tight fit in a pants pocket. Also, in its open state, the N75 measures 7 inches long, so the mouthpiece extends down quite a bit when you're talking on the phone. We also thought that the front flap felt too pliable when held up against the ear. It's not so bad that we think it'll snap off its hinge, but it is something we noticed during our test period. On the upside, the handset features a soft-touch finish that makes the phone easy to grip.
There are some advantages that come with the larger size, namely spacious external and internal displays and a roomy keypad. First, the front flap boasts a 1.3-inch external screen that shows off 262,000 colors at a 160x128 pixel resolution. Aside from displaying the standard information (time, date, signal strength, battery life, and caller ID), it also shows you track information and EQ levels when you're in music mode and acts as a viewfinder in camera mode. And to complement the N75's music abilities, there are dedicated music controls--back, play/pause/stop/ forward--just below the screen. You can even use them to launch the music player and view all your songs without having to open the phone first.
The Nokia N75 features external music controls that are tactile and easy to use.
Once you flip open the phone, you're greeted with a beautiful 2.4-inch diagonal screen that shows off 16 million colors at a 240x320 pixel resolution. Text and images looked gorgeous with vibrant hues and sharp definition, and we could view the display in most lighting conditions. However, the screen does have a tendency to hold smudges and fingerprints.
The N75's menus are intuitive and easy to navigate with the controls found below the screen. These include two soft keys, Talk and End buttons, an edit key, a clear button, a Main Menu shortcut, a Music menu shortcut, and a four-way navigation toggle with center select key. Overall, the layout is spacious, though directional keypad could be a bit tricky for users with larger thumbs. On the other hand, the alphanumeric keypad is extraroomy and features tactile, backlit buttons, keeping misdials to a minimum.
The Nokia N75's extraspacious alphanumerical keypad should keep misdials to a minimum.
On the right spine of the N75, there's a volume rocker, a camera activation key, and another button to switch to video mode. As with the Nokia N95, the placement of the latter two buttons mimics the feel of a digital camera when shooting a picture horizontally and with the front cover closed. The camera lens is located on the back of the handset along with a flash, but unfortunately, there's no lens cover so take care not to scratch the surface. The left side of the Nokia N75 houses the Pop-Port connector (for Nokia's proprietary USB cable and headset), the power connector, and a microSD slot. We're glad that Nokia brought the expansion slot to the exterior of the phone instead of behind of the battery as it's had a tendency to do so on its previous phones. However, we must say the Pop-Port is a bit of a nuisance. First, it's protected by a stiff, attached cover that you have to wrangle every time you want to connect any of the cables. Also, the proprietary port means you can't plug in any pair of headphones (2.5mm or 3.5mm) so you'll have to get an adapter to do so--a bit of a disappointment for such a music-friendly phone.
The music-friendly Nokia N75 features tiny stereo speakers on the left and right side of the phone that produce a big but tinny sound.
Finally, there are two small speakers located on both sides of the phone and a power button on top. The Nokia N75 for Cingular ships with only a USB cable, a power adapter, a software CD, and reference material. Much to our dismay, there is no wired headset or micro SD card included in the box. You can check our cell phone accessories page for such add-ons, ringtones, and help.
Features
Like the Samsung Sync, the big draw of the Nokia N75 is its music capabilities, but it's first and foremost a phone. The phone's address book is limited only by the available memory and the SIM card holds an additional 250 contacts. There's room in each entry for multiple phone numbers, work and home addresses, e-mail addresses, a birthdate, and personal data. For caller ID purposes, you can assign each contact a photo, a group ID, and one of 20 preloaded ring tones. You can, of course, download more, and to mix things up, the mobile also supports 3D ring tone effects with various reverberations and sound trajectories--a fun, little feature. As a quad-band phone, the N75 offers true world roaming as well as a speakerphone, speed dial, conference calling, voice command support, and a vibrate mode. There are also a couple of extra, cool utilities for your phone: Voice Aid and Message Reader. Both use text-to-speech technology, and the former can read your recent calls or your address book's contents back to you, to name two, while the latter will read you your text messages. We tested both apps and while the robotic voice mangles some words, overall it did a good job, and we found them to be handy utilities.
Another big story here is the 3G support. Operating on Cingular's UMTS 850/1900 network, the N75 can achieve data transfer speeds of as fast as 2Mbps (though realistically, you'll experience more in the 300Kbps-to-400Kbps range) and access the carrier's 3G services such as Cingular Video. Of course, we wish the N75 would support HSDPA speeds, as do some of Cingular's other music phones including the Samsung Sync and Motorola Razr V3xx, but we'll take what we get. The N75's integrated Bluetooth 2.0 supports a number of profiles, including wireless headsets, hands-free kits, dial-up networking, generic object exchange, and file transfer. Unlike the N95, the Nokia N75 is not equipped with built-in Wi-Fi or GPS.
So let's get on with the music, shall we? There's a whole subsection of the phone's menu dedicated to music, where you can listen to your songs and watch music videos, shop for music, listen to mobile radio, and more. The N75's integrated music player supports MP3, WMA, M4A, AAC, and eAAC+ formats, among others, and OMA DRM 2.0- and WMDRM-protected songs. It also synchronizes with Windows Media Player and is compatible with PlaysForSure content, so you can play songs purchased from services such as Napster to Go, Yahoo Unlimited, and Cingular Music. We were pretty psyched when we saw that you could access the online music services via the phone, but the excitement was shortlived as we found out that you have to sideload songs from your PC. You can't purchase tracks directly from the phone.
A huge draw of the Nokia N75 is its music capabilities.
To transfer music onto the device, simply use the included USB cable and drag-and-drop tunes in data transfer mode or use the Nokia PC Suite. The phone has about 40MB of user-accessible memory, but we recommend you save the space and load your tunes and other multimedia files onto a microSD card. The N75's expansion slot can accept cards as large as 2GB. Once you've got your songs on the device, the music library categorizes tracks by artists, albums, genres, and composers. You can also create playlists right on the phone and adjust the sound with the built-in equalizer. There are also a host of other music apps through the Cingular Music service, including a music ID service and MobiRadio, but they all require a subscription fee.
The Nokia N75 is equipped with a 2-megapixel camera with a built-in flash and 10x zoom. As with other camera-equipped Nokia N series phones, the N75 offers a wide range of customization and editing options for your images. You get three quality settings, six scene modes, a white balance adjustment, a sequence mode, a self-timer, and more. The camera can also shoot MPEG-4 videos with sound as fast as 15 frames per second, but your editing choices are more limited in this mode.
The N75 may be equipped with a 2-megapixel camera lens and flash, but...
Picture quality was a bit disappointing. We're not sure if it's because the N75 doesn't employ a Carl Zeiss lens as the other N series camera phones do, but images weren't as sharp and the coloring was off, with a blue-gray overtone. Also, we found it a bit awkward to take pictures using the internal display as your viewfinder. Video quality was actually bit better, with sharper definition.
...we were pretty disappointed with the picture quality, as images looked a bit blurry and had a blue-gray tint.
One area where the Nokia N75 might have an edge over the MP3 cell phone competition is productivity. The N75 runs the third edition of the S60 platform on the Symbian operating system for your office needs. An app called QuickOffice lets you view Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, and it optimizes the pages for the phone's screen, so you don't have to scroll all over the place to read text. However, if you want any editing capabilities, you'll have to upgrade the preloaded copy of QuickOffice. For messaging, the N75 supports IMAP4 and POP3 accounts with an attachment viewer. In addition, you can tap into your Yahoo, Hotmail, and AOL mobile e-mail and instant messengers. Other productivity apps and PIM tools include Adobe Reader, a Zip Manager, a calculator, a notepad, a measurement converter, a clock, and a voice recorder.
Performance
We tested the quad-band (GSM 850/900/1800/1900; EDGE; UMTS) Nokia N75 in San Francisco using Cingular service, and call quality was excellent. We had no problems hearing our friends and enjoyed clear, crisp audio with very little background noise. Our callers reported the same and said they couldn't tell we were using a cell phone. The speakerphone was also quite good and had plenty of volume to carry on conversations in noisier environments. In addition, we had no problems pairing the N75 with the Logitech Mobile Traveller Bluetooth headset.
General performance was faster than that of other Nokia N series phones. We didn't experience a long delay when opening and switching between apps, although the camera function slowed things down a bit. Music playback through the phone's dual speakers was actually quite disappointing. While there was plenty of volume, songs sounded tinny and lacked richness. Once again, we also have to point out that the restriction of having to use Nokia's proprietary earbuds (unless you get an adapter) is a big pain. Watching videos on the phone wasn't exactly a treat either. We viewed several clips from the Cingular Video service, including music videos, sports highlights, and news, and some from our personal video library. Though audio and video were synchronized, images were quite pixilated and blurry.
The Nokia N75 is rated for four hours of talk time, and as long as eight days of standby time. In our our battery tests, we got only an appalling two hours of talk time on a single charge. Not only that, but the battery/rear side of the phone also felt very warm. The atrocious talk time battery life may be the result of running on the 3G network, but having to run for the nearest outlet after such a short time is pretty darn bad. For MP3 battery life, we were able to get nine hours of continuous listening time after just one drain test, but we'll update this score as CNET Labs runs the full gamut of performance tests over the next couple of days. According to FCC radiation tests, the N75 has a digital SAR rating of 0.68 watt per kilogram.
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Nokia N75 (AT&T)
