Spotify for Symbian launched

Spotify has finally release the mobile client for the Symbian S60 platform, the most popular and widely used smartphone platform. Models supported includes the Nokia E52 (I suspect the E55 is supported but will test it later), E66, E71, E75, N86, 5800XM, N97, Sony Ericsson Satio and Samsung i7110, Omnia HD; and more. A list of supported devices is available here. Listeners would also be able to listen to Spotify whilst e-mailing, surfing social networking sites or even whilst hillwalking thanks to the multi-tasking nature of the OS.

Available to premium subscribers, the client will allow subscribers to stream music, download 3,333 tracks for offline mode and sync playlists with the desktop client. In fact as a premium subscriber, you can have offline playlists on up to three mobile or desktop devices. Premium costs £9.99 a month and allows the subscriber to stream music at a higher bitrate, use the mobile client and download music for offline mode.

Nokia E75 video review from Glyder Fach, Snowdonia

This is video review (part of the week four challenge) of the Nokia E75 by my partner the technophobe, on the summit plateau of Glyder Fach. We planned on doing it on the Snowdon summit, but we forgot (might as well considering the human traffic up there)! This is a first take, no draft, no script video! I thought about shooting more and editing it later to improvise, but a rough take seems more appropriate and honest.

Nokia E75 "Teach the Technophobe" week four

The final challenge, part of the 'Teach the Technophobe' E75 competition, has been sent out we will attempt to complete it in the summit of Snowdon. If the Met Office (and they are not too reliable at predicting anything beyond the next day's) are to be believed, this will be the fourth walking trip this year we will be doing in the rain! Will update this post when we return on Tuesday/Wednesday.

Nokia E75 "Teach the Technophobe" week three

The third challenge from WOM World/Nokia only arrived today. A new sticker had to be sent out which was why I got it late. If you do not know, this is part of the 'Teach the Technophobe' E75 competition. I'll be out an about today, hopefully getting my technophobe to capture a nice picture for the challenge. Until then you can read about my past challenges here.

As I mentioned earlier, the E75 has the ability to geotag pictures taken. This is a simple enough process that involves turning on the GPS receiver and enabling location tagging withing the camera settings. Obviously this depends on whether the GPS receiver on the E75 has acquired its position. This can take up to a couple of minutes depending on location (outdoors works best) and the weather. Any co-ordinates will be recorded as a metadata on the image's EXIF.

Geotagging images has plenty of advantages. The most obvious is a way or organising your images by location. If you share images on Flickr, location tags will allow users to quickly trawl through images based on location. You can also use online maps like Google Maps to create an interactive map.

BTW, if your Series 60 phone has no support for geotagging (my E51 does not), an application like ViewRanger is a good alternative. Whilst it does not tag the images taken with the E51's camera with co-ordinates, you are able to upload images to ViewRanger's server. Images can be shared on ViewRanger's TravelLog site, which shows an interactive map with pin-points representing images.

Anyway, an update. My partner has just completed the third challenge. Basically the challenge calls for the technophobe to send me an e-mail of a picture taken of herself, and if possible a link to a map of where she took the picture. The reason why I wrote about the geotagging ability of the E75 is precisely that - it is much easier to let your images be tagged automatically so you can go through them later in pin-pointing exactly where each image was taken. When I brought the E75 to the Lake District, I had the GPS turn on for GPS logging and picture taking. You can see some of the results here. As I said earlier, the E75 is a good camera phone, but it won't replace your dedicated digital camera or even a high end camera phone like the N86.

So back to the challenge. As you know it has been a rainy day and she e-mailed me a picture of her all wet and pouting from her lunch walk. Privacy concerns meant that I won't be posting the picture up here, nor a link to Google Maps of where she works. Sorry.

Nokia E75 "Teach the Technophobe" week two

The second challenge from WOM World/Nokia's, part of the 'Teach the Technophobe' competition, has arrived and it is pretty straight forward. Here it is:

Pigeons may be the bane of anyone who's ever tried to eat a sandwich in a public park, but cut them some slack. Has any bird ever carried so many messages?

Just like those pigeons used to carry messages back and forth, email is a two way process. Why not tage a photo on your device and email it across to your coach to see what he/she thinks?

It could be funny, it could be poignant, it could be dull (don't make it dull), but the goal is to elicit an interesting response so be creative.

Now I haven't coached my partner yet (she is still out), but I'll go ahead and post a tutorial here for any newbies that may be reading. Nokia has made things simple by integrating functions within the camera applications that allows one to quickly select an image to be sent via e-mail, thus reducing the number of steps needed to attach an image to an e-mail. Here's a step by step guide using the Nokia E75.



Capture the image. This is simply enough.



The image preview area allows you to delete, view the image in the gallery, share it online or send it via a messaging client.



Choose the method of delivery (in this case e-mail).



If you have more than one e-mail account, select the account you wish to send the image from.



The image will have been attached already. Compose the e-mail, choose your desired recipient, add more attachment if you wish etc.



Send, and follow the on-screen promts which allows you to select your desired access connection (3G, WiFi etc.).



The message will be stored in the outbox if there is no working connection, or if you wish to delay sending (e.g. if there are no WiFi access point).



You can always manually send it if once you are near a working WiFi access point.

As you can see the process from capturing an image is very simple and seamless. It was never this simple during my Palm OS and Windows Mobile days (though I suspect that things may have improved significantly now). With integrations like this, mobile messaging and e-mail has never been easier.

Update:



My partner (the technophobe) actually found the process to be rather easy after I pointed out that images can be attached to an e-mail message from the camera application itself. She did have a bit of a hiccup as she did not realise the e-mail was kept in the outbox and she had to manually connect. Once she figured that out, it was plain sailing.

This is picture of Patrick, the loveable and skinny red dog, of whom we have a wonderful history together.

Nokia E75 coverage:
Nokia E75 camera review
Nokia E75 e-mail
Nokia E75 GPS review
Nokia E75 music and sound quality review
Nokia E75 pictures & first impressions

Nokia E75 "Teach the Technophobe" week one

Part of my agreement in obtaining a loaner E75 with WomWorld/Nokia involves taking part in a challenge called 'Teach the Technophobe'. Each week I'll receive four challenges of sorts, where I am required to tutor a technophobe friend or family on the E75's various capabilities. My technophobe of choice is my partner, who while once used a smartphone (HTC Magician) for two years is completely oblivious to their messaging and web capabilities, and never use any advance functionalities like document editing or GPS. Today I received my first challenge where I have to coach a technophobe on how to set up an e-mail account on the device and send a test message.

It sounds simple enough, but it isn't always the case with previous mobile technology. I remember back in my Palm OS days where I have to set up my Sony Clies and Palm/palmOne devices to synchronise my e-mail account (Yahoo! UK). The devices back then have no mobile phone capabilities, so one of the few ways of pulling down e-mails was through using a mobile phone (typically a Sony Ericsson back then) as a modem. This can be done via either Infrared (remember those?), Bluetooth or wired tethering, and keying in all the necessary port address, numbers and whatever else that is required. It was do-able, but I can see how newbies will be put off by all the steps required to just receive an e-mail.

These days such excuses are no longer valid. With newer and more matured platforms, setting up e-mail is easy as steps are largely automated, as most of the process are handled at Nokia's server end. With the E75 this is easy. Nokia has made huge improvement with the way their enterprise devices handle e-mail. The E75 e-mail clients supports both traditional POP3 and IMAP based e-mails such as those provided by popular free web-based e-mail like Yahoo! or GMail, as well as corporate e-mail by way of Microsoft Exchange push e-mail technology. My partner has a work e-mail account which, with my help, was setup to fetch them in no time. Setting it up to use with her web-based account was even easier. It took her less than 5 minutes to get the two e-mail accounts running on her E75.

Creating an e-mail account on the E75 is easy. First launch the E-mail application, the click on 'New', which will launch the e-mail account creation wizard. Here you can select the connection required by the E75 to access the internet (such as 3G or WLAN). The next dialog box will ask for the e-mail address (example@example.com) and the next will require you to key in the password. If you are setting up an Exchange account, you will need to input further settings such as the web address where your company's Outlook Web Access resides. Likewise if you are using an obscure e-mail service or is hosting your own e-mail server, you will need to input the settings manually, though I suspect people who does so will have no problems doing so.

Once you are done, the e-mail client will receive a new icon (in the form of whichever webmail you choose, Yahoo! and GMail icons both turned up fine) which takes you to your e-mail account, where you can connect and syncronised your e-mails. Advance settings are available that allows you to customise each of your mailbox. For example you can set it to retrieve only a certain amount of kB or the number of messages from the inbox it is allowed to download. You can also set it to syncronised folders (IMAP only) or and the update interval it connects to your mailbox.

Nokia's e-mail client may lack the glamour finish of its rivals, but what it lacks it makes up for its ease of use and vast amount of functionality. Attachments is supported, as is the ability to set priorities. There are plenty of powerful shortcuts to remember that will no doubt increase productivity. For example if you want to reply to an e-mail, just press 'R' on the keyboard. Similarly press 'F' to forward the e-mail, or 'D' to delete etc. The client also supports full HTML messages.

My extensive Nokia E75 coverage:
Nokia E75 camera review
Nokia E75 GPS review
Nokia E75 music and sound quality review
Nokia E75 pictures & first impressions

Nokia E75 GPS review

Like the Nokia E71 and E66, the E75 is one of Nokia's now many Series 60 smartphones to be supplied with a built-in GPS receiver with A-GPS and digital compass functionality. The GPS can also be assisted via the downloading of ephemeris data that helps with speed. Like the E66, it took me around a minute to get a fix from cold boot on a clear day, though it can take up to a couple of minutes in cloudy days. It also happens to work from about 3 feet in doors in a clear day. I am not sure which GPS receiver chipset the E75 uses, but it works just as well as my SiRFstarIII powered Navman B10.

I recently took the E75 to the Lake District in Cumbria as my GPS companion. I also have my trusty E51 and Navman B10 which I keep in a dry sack as a backup device. The obvious advantage of having it the E75 is it is integrated and you do not have to worry about carrying multiple devices. On the downside it appears to run out of battery faster than my E51+B10 combination, when it comes to navigation. Still it lasted more than seven hours (with the phone portion off) before the battery gave up, which is good enough for a day's walk. It works with Nokia Maps 2.0 and ViewRanger, the application which I use to the test the E75's GPS navigation capabilities.

I found the amount of the time to get fix from cold boot to be about on par with most devices with built-in GPS receiver, in that not so great but acceptable. Without resorting to A-GPS, the receiver took around three minutes to get a fix under a cloudy day (it was very cloudy in the Lakes when we were there). Once a fix is gained it retains to the fix pretty well. A dedicated application GPS Data allows you to check your position, accuracy level, altitude, speed of movement, trip distance, satellite status, calibrate the altitude, selecting the positioning method (GPS only, Assisted-based, Bluetooth-GPS and Network based) and other advance settings.


I am reusing the screenshot from my E66 review of the GPS Data application as it is essentially the same...

The battery life of the E75's on GPS is no match for my E51 and B10 combo, but it is still far better than I initially anticipated. With the phone but turn off, the E75 lasted more than seven hours. Obviously your mileage may wary: lowering the brightness level and decreasing the amount of time before the phone switches off the display will all help decrease the amount of power needed by the E75.

The accuracy of the E75 based on my experience is around 10-20 metre, which is pretty darn accurate for a none-dedicated GPS receiver. As the E75 isn't designed to be a rugged and waterproof device, the E75 stayed tucked away inside my jacket or trousers for most of the time, which does cause the accuracy to suffer a bit. A little bit of very light rain and mist won't damage it, but I rather not test it further seeing that I do not own this particular unit. I have included a number of screenshots of the track that the E75 recorded via ViewRanger where you can judge the accuracy yourself. I personally think it did fine.









Obviously the hardware is only good if paired with a software that takes full advantage of it, and in this case the E75 comes with Nokia Maps 2.0 (an excellent street based mapping software). It is also compatible with Google Maps, though with Nokia Maps I do not see why you would need it (unless online search is important to you). If you enjoy walking or hiking as I do, make sure you buy Augmentra's brilliant ViewRanger (detailed review here). For £25, the Ordnance Survey GB National Park Landranger 1:50k bundle offers a ridiculous amount of great value for money for those seeking to explore Britain's many beautiful National Parks.

As the E75's GPS navigation performance (with better battery life and slightly better accuracy) is similar to the E66, the conclusion is exactly the same. I do not drive so I won't comment about the E75's performance when it comes to providing turn by turn directions using programs like Nokia Maps - but I do think it will suffice. As far as hiking and trekking is concern, if you do not need super accurate performance then I see no problem with using the E75 as your navigational platform, as long as you can dismiss its margin of error. I find the E75 rather handy to have one with me at all times. It is a blessing having not to worry about packing (and charging) my B10 every other day.

The E75 is available unlocked for around £300 at Amazon UK and US$450 at Amazon.com

My extensive Nokia E75 coverage:
Nokia E75 pictures & first impressions
Nokia E75 camera review
Nokia E75 music and sound quality review

Nokia E75 music review

Nokia has been making amends on their E-series of late. No longer recognising that E-series users are only made up of boring business suits, Nokia has finally removed the 2.5mm headphone jack from the newer E-series phones. Here the E75, has a bog-standard 3.5mm headphone socket that allows you to use your favourite headphone with it without the need of adapters. Still it doesn't matter if it comes with a 3.5mm socket, if the sound quality sucks then nobody will use it as a music player.

Thankfully the E75 is a very capable music phone. The bundled 4GB microSDHC card is a good start, but with maps and third party applications, you are only looking at around 2-3GB of viable storage to store your tunes on. 16GB microSDHC cards are not too expensive these days, so that would be my suggestion if you are keen on expanding the storage capacity of the E75. The E75 should support new 32GB microSDHC cards when they become more widely available.



Transferring files is an easy process as the E75 is both UMS and MTP compatible. You can drag and drop or use Windows Media Player or Media Monkey (my personal favourite) to synchronise your music library. Once you have done that, just launch the music player and wait for the application to refresh the library and build its database. The music application is pretty much a standard Series 60 bundled music player, meaning it serves its purpose and lacks the eye candy of dedicated DAP. It supports MP3, WMA, AAC and HE-AAC audio codecs, so pretty much every mainstream codecs out there.

The music player here is pretty basic. The library is sorted by artist, album, genre and composer. It also recognises standard M3U playlist file. There are no dedicated hardware music keys on the E75, so the control is limited to the d-pad (which maps itself to the on-screen keys), and volume keys on the side. The volume control is ridiculous, only allowing ten steps! My ideal listening volume would be somewhere between 30% (too low) and 40% (too loud). A 30-step volume system similar to my Sony Walkman would be ideal (firmware update please, Nokia). The music player is very boring to look at, not something I would complain as it primarily resides inside my pocket.

Because the E75 is based on the music-centric XpressMusic 5730, the E75 has the necessary hardware chipset designed for better sound quality. The SQ here is pretty good actually, easily as good as the XpressMusic 5310 and far better than my trusty E51. They sound best unequalised. I am not too sure if it is a bug, but the E75's 8-band preset graphical equaliser is pretty awful. The bass boost for whatever reason doesn't boost the bass at all, but instead makes the sound all fuzzy and digital. Fortunately you can create your own equaliser preset. Also stereo widening option is available, but I suggest avoiding that. Still, with my Sennheiser IE 8, the E75 is a very good sounding music phone. If you want more bass, create your own custom equaliser and avoid the bass boost feature.

With support for Bluetooth A2DP, the E75 is an overall competent music phone. It is great that Nokia is finally realising that there are business users out there who are as keen on music playback as they are with getting actual work done. With the E75, you get a phone that allows both. The SQ isn't as brilliant as my Walkmans (they sound too digital for my liking - I always like some colour and warmth with my music), but they are miles ahead of other previous E-series phones, and probably not too far behind their N-series phones.

Nothing will ever replace dedicated DAPs, but get a larger capacity card, replace the bundled headphones with something a bit better (check my reviews here for something that may suit your preference), EQ it a bit to suit your personal sound taste and you may just ditch that DAP for those times when travelling light is crucial.

The E75 is available unlocked for around £300 at Amazon UK and US$450 at Amazon.com

My extensive Nokia E75 coverage:
Nokia E75 pictures & first impressions
Nokia E75 camera review
Nokia E75 GPS review

Nokia E75 camera review

The Nokia E75 camera is pretty much what I expected from an E-series phone: reasonable performance that is good enough for e-mail and web stills, but hardly something capable of replacing dedicated cheap digital cameras or camera focused mobile phones like Sony Ericsson Cybershot phones or Nokia's Carl Zeiss equipped phones. Still, on paper at least, the E75 is one of the better camera equipped E-series phone out there.

The camera here is a standard 3.2 megapixel affair with auto focus, macro mode (software toggled), LED flash and cheap optics. I would say that the performance is a little bit better than the 3.2 megapixel camera on the E66 or E71, likely due to a new sensor and/or software optimisation. Like any mobile phone equipped camera, natural light availability is a huge requirement to getting the camera to perform well. Anything other than that and you may as well forget about it and save some precious KB.

The shutter button sits almost on the middle of the E75, hardly an ideal location in my opinion, particularly when the slider portion is open. The UI of the camera is still, in my opinion, one of the worst Nokia bundled application - I absolutely dislike it. It is pretty much unintuitive, though to be fair the UI is a fair bit faster than what I remember it was on the E66 or E71. If all you want to do is press the shutter down and capture an image, then it works well. But accessing try changing multiple options every time you boot up the software and you will cringe and wonder how on earth the same engineers who came up with Series 60 now matured and intuitive UI, developed this... On the upside you can tag your pictures with GPS co-ordinates using the Nokia E75's built-in GPS receiver.

The LED flash is there if you require them, though I really and honestly suggest ignoring it. It is no match for Xenon equipped phones, but let's be honest here - people should not, under any none-reasonable excuse, use the built-in flash of any mobile phone, whether equipped with LED or Xenon.

As for video, the E75 is capable of recording at VGA resolution at 30 frames per second. Not too shabby, on paper. In reality, it isn't too bad either. The quality of the video is ideal for the YouTube generation, though the lack of widescreen format may annoy some. Personally I am more of a picture guy than video, but this may come in handy to those who love making spur-on-the-moment videos for YouTube.

All in all, the E75 offers a reasonable camera performance, that is adequete as a backup to your digital compact. If you require something that is capable of capturing print quality images, then this phone is not for you, and you should turn your attention instead to camera focused phones like the new Nokia N86 or the Series 60 5th Edition powered Sony Ericsson Idou.

Some unedited (but resized) pictures from our recent Lake District trip:






The camera outperforms previous E-series when it comes to taking close ups. Notice how much detail is captured of the brilliant Leatherman Micra:

100% crops:

f/2.8, ISO 128, 1/20 sec

f/2.8, ISO 60, 1/53 sec

f/2.8, ISO 60, 1/167 sec

The E75 is available unlocked for around £300 at Amazon UK and US$450 at Amazon.com

My extensive Nokia E75 coverage:
Nokia E75 pictures & first impressions
Nokia E75 GPS review
Nokia E75 music and sound quality review

Nokia E75 glamour photo shoot

Have been spending some quality time with the E75, but it is still early to give a full impressions. The sound quality is a considerable improvement over the E51 and even the 5310 XpressMusic, though the music player still lacks the usability and features of dedicated DAP like my Walkman.

The QWERTY thumboard is made up of flat keys and feels similar to my old HTC Universal phone. Give a choice, I actually prefer the thumboard from the E71 (which in my honest opinion, is the perfect example of how to do a QWERTY phone), but this isn't too bad. Despite the size, the E75 is pretty hefty (in a good way) and solidly built. It is just slightly thicker than the E51 and has a similar overall footprint. Impressive considering that the E75 has GPS, a better camera and a sliding keyboard...

Some close up pictures to keep you occupied while I get myself more accustomed with the E75:











The E75 is available unlocked for around £300 at Amazon UK and US$450 at Amazon.com

Nokia E75 unboxing

Look at what DHL develivered today. I was expecting a parcel, but didn't expect this! O_o









Glamour pictures later tonight. Impressions will have to wait till next week after my Lake Distirct trip, which I'll take advantage as a testing bed for the E75's GPS capabilities (with ViewRanger) and its photographic functions.

Thanks to Donna @ WomWorld for providing the E75.

The E75 is available unlocked for around £300 at Amazon UK and US$450 at Amazon.com