The side-sliding QWERTY form factor lands on Symbian turf following a reasonably successful spell on the WinMo side of the yard.

The major novelty of the Nokia E75 is the form factor and we're about to see if this is enough for it to carve a niche out for itself in a crowded market.

There's no denying that if a side-sliding QWERTY is good enough for a teenage-targeted music phone (the Nokia 5730 XpressMusic), it must be more than at home in a full-featured business phone. Welcome to the Nokia E75.

Key features

• 2.4" 16M-color TFT display of QVGA resolution
• Four-row side-slide QWERTY keyboard
• Quad-band GSM and tri-band 3G (with HSDPA) support
• Symbian OS with S60 3.2 UI
• 369 MHz ARM11 CPU
• 3.5mm standard audio jack
• microSD card slot, 4GB microSD card prebundled
• 3.2 megapixel auto focus camera with a dedicated shutter key, geotagging and VGA@30fps video recording
• Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g with UPnP technology
• Built-in GPS receiver and Nokia Maps with 3 months of free voice-assisted navigation
• USB and stereo Bluetooth (A2DP) connectivity
• Steel battery cover
• FM radio with RDS
• Remote Wipe functionality
• Carrier-independent VoIP support
• Office document editor
• User-friendly Mode Switch for toggling two homescreen setups
• Smart dialing

Main disadvantages:

• Rather expensive at this point (more than 350 euro)
• Controls around the D-pad are too tiny
• Mediocre camera performance
• Fingerprint-prone cheap-looking front
• Wiggling cheapo camera key
• Limited battery life (in comparison to the E71)

Even if we leave aside the scores of competing business handsets, the Nokia E75 still faces quite stiff competition from within the E-series range itself. It's unreasonably close to the E90 as far as pricing is concerned and is quite uncomfortably cloning most of Nokia E71 functionality. The side-sliding QWERTY keyboard and FP2 are pretty much all the E75 has over the E71.

It's more like an alternative we're talking here rather than a substantial upgrade. Truth be told, we were pretty impressed with the Nokia E71 and if the E75 matches its performance then there will be no reason to grumble.