A few weeks ago, I got a fun little package in the mail. It was from the UK and inside it was a shiny new Nokia E75 phone for me to use and review and so I did before sending it back this week.
Small footprint and stylish
My first impression when I pulled the E75 out of the box is how small it is. It’s about as thick as some of the thinner smart phones, maybe as tall, and definitely less wide. The trade-off for the small size is the screen, which is also on the smallish side compared to a lot of the high end smart phones that boast large colorful screens. I love my screen real estate, so that was a drawback for me.
The E75 just looks good on the outside. It’s not the best looking phone I’ve had the pleasure to review, but it’s definitely up there. I want a phone to look good from afar, but then the small details really drive it home for me. In the case of the E75, it starts with the vibrant red or deep black front color and silver back combined with more oblong rounded corners, creating a noticeable break from the popular rectangle with slightly rounded corners in black and gray. When you get closer you catch some of those details like the muted silver contrasted by chrome accents and a textured metal back plate. The keypad on the front is pretty easy to handle by touch, alone, and the two little bumps in the middle help you know where your thumb is on the key pad or provide a starting point. At the top of the key pad are some multi-purpose buttons that might have been better as just individual buttons. However, this phone does provide a lot more options right from the key pad, which is nice. An unexpected visual treat was the slider’s full keyboard. Colored to match the phone, it looked good, and the layout is great, offering slightly larger keys than some others while providing all the right keys. The only think I didn’t like was that the keys were so flush with the phone, which had me hitting the wrong keys a lot. Keys should be raised an appropriate amount from the surface to prevent this. The keys had a coating that felt a bit like a matte paint coat. On a phone like this, I thought it made it feel more exclusive. It’s definitely a unique phone in it’s class.
Every day use
The call quality was decent, as I had expected, but what about the user experience? The smaller screen detracted from the on-screen experience only in that I felt I was scrolling a lot, especially during web browsing. Luckily, Nokia makes up for that quite a bit with the really smooth scrolling. Through menus and applications, the scrolling was probably smoother than I’ve seen on any other phone that wasn’t a touch screen. Everything seemed easy enough to get to without a lot of hassle and the center navigation button proved useful for easy and accurate navigation. Two thing I use a lot on a phone are email and web browsing that’s becoming more and more the case with the rest of the world, too. The email functionality of this phone was decent. The mailbox access and filtering options were easy to change and general email operations were up to par. The web browsing experience suffered from the screen size to an expected degree but also helped show off the vibrant screen, which didn’t seem so vibrant otherwise. The keyboard slides out smoothly, the buttons are all in the right places, and it’s very responsive. The 3.2 Megapixel camera is full featured, but seemed to fall short on photo quality in my tests.
Conclusions
It’s a great phone, but it could use some improvements. Namely, I’d like a bigger screen and raised keys on the keyboard. The camera is, after all, a cell phone camera, so improvements in photo quality would be nice, but it still takes decent photos for a phone. The phones aesthetic is nearly perfect and it’s a great size and weight. The E75 is a decent offering for the price, and is a great tool for the traveling business person, and at $399, it’s decently equipped for the job.
Who here loves some geeky television? I see you raising your hand (well, let’s pretend, anyway). So you probably already love G4 TV’s AOTS, right? If you haven’t heard of it, you should, but even if you have, did you know about their web presence?
Attack of the Show is a visual geekfest in motion, hosted by gorgeous Olivia Munn and charismatic Kevin Pereira with a whole cast of correspondents and others who help bring it all together. The show is loaded with various segments, including a couple of my favorites, Gadget Pr0n and Around the Net. But enough about the show… I really want to talk about the site. They do a pretty good job of bringing the whole experience to the web, and I expect that from such a show. After all, they’re a show about technology and the web. If it’s techie and online, they’ll probably talk about it.
The AOTS web site has a blog to keep you up to date, episode and segment clips you can stream online, photos and forums. There’s also an “Interact” portion of the site to help get you involved, I mean a little closer than just the forums. In this section, you can send emails and tweets to the hosts. The tweets is the part that interests me a lot. More and more, we’re seeing smarter media integrating twitter and engaging their audience. Here’s a great example plucked right from the Interact section of the site:
Send your questions for Battlestar Galactica’s Edward James Olmos to @AOTS and we’ll try to have him answer them on today’s show!
The only thing that had me wagging my finger at AOTS was that I couldn’t find links to the staff twitter accounts. I could read their feeds on the site, but wanted to follow them. Still, between the vast amount of cheeky content, reviews, and obscure web finds and the chat, email, forums and Twitter integration the site has to offer, anyone who missed the show on cable doesn’t have to look far to get brought up to speed and then some.
Like me, a lot of people have more than one remote control in their home to control the TV, VCR, DVD player, Stereo, and on and on. I remember the first time I heard of a universal remote. I honestly didn’t care much because we pretty much just had a TV to control, but I remember thinking it was kind of cool that you could program it. Unfortunately, as I later found out, they don’t always work for all devices and these days, the function set of your TV or component might not be supported by the standard buttons on a typical universal remote control. Just take a look at the remote for your TV or newest component and count all the buttons. My new TV has at least 8 buttons that I’m not sure even do anything with my model of TV. The solution is to have one remote, but it has to really be able to handle everything you try to control with it.
An example from my life
I really like my in-laws. So much, in fact, that I was pleased when they stayed with us for a few weeks last Spring. There was really only one problem while they were here, and that was my media system setup. They’re smart, just not really into all the tech like I am, so my wife let me know that I was “on call” while I worked late to help with any issues that arose from the use of our system. We had the VCR, DVD player, XBox and cable to manage. They only wanted to watch TV and the occasional DVD, but we had four remotes and cats that step on remotes, so if the input button on the TV remote got hit by accident, I might get a call asking why the TV didn’t work and it could be much worse. When I lived with a roommate who loved to hook up all kinds of audio and video components, there was actually an order in which I had to turn the system on. I had him write it down for me because it involved three remotes just to watch TV. Something like this would have been pretty handy at the time.
What is neoHD?
What is this holy grail of remotes I’m talking about. It’s the Yamaha neoHD and it’s more than just a remote like I initially thought. Normally, you think of a solution to this problem and a universal remote comes to mind, maybe even a fancy one, but this is more of a system with a simplified remote to control it.
Less buttons is a good thing. You hook up all your components to the base unit and then throw all the old remotes in a drawer somewhere because the whole system is now under the control of one remote. The blue Control button gets you into the system switching and more advanced remote options like you might need to access if you want subtitles with that French film, but at all other times, you just navigate like normal with a need-based set of standard buttons. I love the concept because, the geek that I am, even I would hit a button on accident and have no idea what I just hit or what it did. The setup seems simple enough, and the site has videos on how the system works and how to set it all up. It also comes in a WiFi model for streaming music and one with surround sound speakers so you’ll be all ready to go. Starting around $600 it’s for someone who is enthusiastic about their home media experience and can afford to do it right. For the money, it seems like a really complete system that should simplify things.
And here’s the good news… You can also try and win your own neoHD for free just by submitting a Yamaha neoHD Sweepstakes Entry like I’m about to do. A couple really easy ways to enter:
- Head to this blog post and leave a comment (make sure to read the post, too, for a couple more ways to enter)
- Tweet the following to enter: “I just entered to win a #neoHD b/c I have too many remotes, visit (http://urlbrief.com/e44caa) to enter”
Are you on Facebook? If so, search for neoHD to learn more about the company and the product. Finally, let us know how much you could use one. Is your coffee table covered in remotes? How many remotes do you have?
This week, I have a double-shot of bookmarks for you because I was out of town and just too crazy busy last week. As always, I’m starting with the Twitter suggestions. Don’t forget, if you want a link to your Twitter account, just follow me on Twitter and tweet the following:
@joetech I want a free link in your Bookmark Friday post : http://www.joetech.com/suggests/bmftw
This week, we had just one tweeter request a link:
Ceiling fan POV – Great project for using the power of your ceiling fan to display something cool in LED lights… like the Batman logo, for example.
Quirky – I got an email yesterday about the launch of a new product developed by Quirky, a fast-paced crowd-sourcing product development site that takes your idea and input from other members and then builds, promotes, and sells the product, disbursing royalties to the idea giver and all the participants.
