The Thrilling conclusion: Archaic OS + wonderful 3rdparty apps (e.g. ShoZu + Qik + Gravity) = mobile multimedia creator happiness iff:
You can get this phone at a good price (since it's now over a year old, maybe you can get the E75 at a substantial discount e.g. $200)
You don't mind the user unfriendliness of S60V3 and the puny 320x240 screen. S60 V3 is unfriendly and archaic compared to iPhone and Android and other modern mobile operating systems but Symbian has some excellent free or cheap 3rd party programs for mobile multi-media content creators i.e. Gravity + ShoZu + Qik are all free or under 10 Euro each which means that with these programs you have a multi-media creator's powerhouse.
But since the Nokia C6 was introduced does it make sense to consider the E75? Not for me. the C6 is cheaper, has a bigger screen and more up to date software!
C'mon Nokia bundle ShoZu, Qik and Gravity with the C6 and pitch the phone to multi-media creators, students and journalists! It would be a killer combo.
Got my phone bill last month and it's my highest bandwidth usage ever. 875MB primarily because I streamed 640x480 video using Qik on the E75. Just goes to show you that as I have suspected, once you start streaming at 640x480 or higher e.g. HD, your mobile bandwidth is going to start rapidly rising and suddenly having a multi-gigabyte data plan makes sense!
In other words once Apple catches up :-) with Nokia in terms of being able to stream 640x480 or higher resolution video over 3G, 3.5 G or 4G, it's going to bring the mobile network to its knees (at least the Canadian mobile networks and probably most other North American ones which are not designed for mass market video streaming)!
As I blogged about before (e.g. with my N999 concept), the future is great cameraphone pictures & video coupled with always on, always available connectivity. And the closest thing so far to this future is 3.5G combined with a cameraphone with a decent video camera and still camera, i.e. not the current iPhone's cr*ppy camera.
Sometimes I actually see glimpses of the future. That's how I felt tonight with Qik streamed live (check out the video below after the break) over HSDPA 3.5G from the E75-1. What a great wonderful tool for artists and journalists. Imagine if instead of the decent camera in the E75, it was replaced with the camera from the N93 i.e. something with a usable optical zoom and a Zeiss lens!. Magic! Nokia please make it so :-)
I'm a fan of the future - quick video at Vancouver Startup Drinks
Part 2 of my E75 review is a short update to say that the E75-1 works great with Rogers/Fido 3.5 G aka HSDPA and it's fast with ShoZu and Gravity. I thought that Rogers HSDPA was only compatible with the E75-1 (but a search through the specs shows that the E75-1 works great with 2100MHz but not 850MHz HSDPA and Rogers offers 2100MHz so that makes sense!). Now I am dreaming of having an N86 and/or N900 with 3.5G. Wow that would be fast and a great experience!
A while back I thought I lost my N82. In my panic I tweeted about the horror of using the iPhone 3G's camera (I love iPhone apps but hate the camera!) and the nice folks at WOMWORLD Nokia offered to lend me an E75 with a QWERTY keyboard and 3.2 megapixel camera until I bought an N82 replacement.
Fortunately I found the N82 but by then I had the E75 (thanks to Tom Hall of WOMWORLD Nokia!)
So this will be an abbreviated series of stream of consciousness reviews
I actually like the E75 form factor. It's light and thin! And the slide is nice
Gravity rocks on it. Best Twitter client on any mobile platform. Only limited by the small screen.
The screen doesn't have enough pixels! (320x240 belongs in the dustbin of history :-) certainly doesn't belong on a "business" phone like the E75 that was introduced in spring of 2009!) So Gravity and other heavy text and graphics based apps like the web browser suffer
S60 5th 3rd edition shall we say is "long in the tooth". I am not going to repeat my past anti-S60 whingeing (e.g. N97 S60 whingeing) :-) Suffice to say that anachronistic unusable error messages like"Create WLAN connection in offline mode?" abound. As well as the many other S60 issues (e.g. the antiquated web browser, c'mon Nokia, put a modern Web Kit browser on the E75 via a software update, please!)
The camera is decent. Far better than the iPhone (and the E71) but not nearly as good as the N82 which shows you that Nokia is still ahead of Apple (but for how much longer?) - check out my e75 photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/roland/tags/e75photo/
