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Nokia E75

The Finns' first full slide-out alpha keyboard

The four-line keyboard is well spaced, but the flat keys, made of rubberised plastic, aren't as tactile and easy to distinguish with your thumbs as, for instance, those on Nokia's E71, or HTC's Qwerty-packing smartphones - such as the S470 - which have sloping buttons that rise like little hillocks to meet your thumbs.

Nokia E75

The keyboard's too flat for fast typing...

There's a metal bar running through the middle of the keyboard which appears to be there for support. Besides looking a bit odd, it doesn't get in the way. The keyboard itself is well thought out, with essential keys like '@' and '.' all readily available with a single button press. Numbers, which are ranged along the top line, require an additional press of the Shift key.

The edging doesn't come up to Nokia's usual pernickety standard and the edges of the plastic casing stand slightly proud of the keyboard, so that we found they tended to catch irritatingly on our thumbnails. The model we tried was an early sample, however, so this may be fixed in full production models.

Email, absolutely essential on a phone like this, proved to be easy to set up and use thanks to Nokia Messaging - an update on Nokia Email which is currently free, though Nokia has warned that it may later become part of network charges. It supports Yahoo! Mail and Gmail, among others, and POP and IMAP accounts. You can view email in HTML format and access up to ten different email addresses.

The browser is a good one, with easy options to zoom and search full pages as well as find text, phone numbers or email addresses on web pages.

Nokia E75

...but it is well laid out

Fast access is assured with both the HSDPA 3G connection and Wi-Fi, which also proved easy to set up. There's a motion sensor on board to auto-rotate the screen from portrait to landscape, but the E75 will also do this automatically when you open the keyboard. Everything you need for a good browsing experience, in other words.

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