Earlier this week, I had the opportunity to test drive three of Nokia’s latest mobile phones: E71, E75, and N97 and see the latest “Nokia Messaging” app in action.

Nokia Messaging is extremely easy to use and lets you simultaneously keep track of  and toggle between up to 10 email addresses from thousands of providers including Windows Live Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, Gmail, and AOL Mail.  Nokia is putting a lot of attention on simplifying the messaging experience, and it’s working.  As Atif Hussein, Vice President, Products, Nokia Messaging said:

“We’ve come to understand that a key barrier for mass email adoption is not the lack of features, but the usability. Nokia Messaging was designed for ease of use and mobility. While offering people a full feature set, Nokia Messaging still minimizes user actions and simplifies the complex, such as eliminating the need to know technical information. This reduces confusion and the amount of time taken to set up and start using the service on the phone. By prioritizing common actions and needs, we bring the most relevant and frequently used actions upfront.”

You can learn more about Nokia Messaging and download the app to supported phones here.

Nokia E75

The Nokia E75 is the first phone to come preloaded with Nokia Messaging, and it’s a winner.  It’s got a sleek laser cut metal casing, slim design, sliding QWERTY keyboard, a 3.2 megapicsel camera with zoom and flash, and an integrated A-GPS receiver, which makes it easy to take advantage of location based services including geotagging and turn by turn directions (with a subscription).

Nokia E71x

As an AT&T user, I’m particularly looking forward to the E71x, which was announced earlier in the week and is coming to AT&T soon.  Nokia calls it “the world’s slimmest qwerty device,” and it’s the first Nokia smartphone that AT&T is subsidizing (at least in my memory).   It’s an internet savvy 3G device with WiFi, a built-in music player, 3.2 megapixel auto-focus camera, GPS with turn by turn directions (with a subscription to AT&T Navigator), it works with Exchange and other email types, and it has office tools like notes, calendar, live stream video communications and more.

Nokia N97

The mobile I was looking most forward to trying out of the bunch was the N97.  I saw demoed it in February at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, but I got hands-on with the device this week.  The N97 packs a huge punch and I love the fact that it’s got a touch screen, but I prefer the slim form factor on both the E75 and E71x.  That said, the N97 has a lot of features that you don’t see in the E75 or E71x like a 3.5″ touch screen, a great 5 megapicsel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, and 48 GB of storage, including 32 GB of on-board memory, all of which contribute to the N97’s larger size.

Stay tuned, and I’ll provide more comprehensive reviews and commentary on these products in future posts.