Excellent As Usual
Written: Nov 10 '07
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Exceptional Audio, screen and camera. Symbian.
Cons: No wifi
The Bottom Line: Good substitute for: Ipod, Camera, Messenger, Agenda.
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| eiapoce's Full Review: Nokia N73 Smartphone |
Boxing
The N73 comes boxed nicely. The box and its innards are made of cardboard and are ecologically more sound than plastics.
In the box you’ll find the mobile phone, charger, battery, hear buds with microphone and the connection cable. A couple of instruction books and the CD with the drivers/programs end the bundle.
There is practically no installation to do, the mobile phone once turned on will greet you asking location date and time. And from there on you’re on your own.
Brief Description
It is a Symbian Smartphone running the S60 third version operating system. The resolution is Quarter VGA at 320*240 or 240*320 as it would be more correct to assess. The main problem with the new advanced software revision is a good deal of security enhancements! This is because they make the software installation a much more difficult process. Applications have now to be signed and the phone sometime refuses to install them if the certificates are not conform to the standard.
Apart the installation issues it has a couple of cameras, front at 320*240 for telecommunications and the rear one at 3.1 Mpixels with a Karl Zeiss optical autofocus lens.
The audio part is handled by the speakerphone but also by a couple of very powerful stereo speakers! (I’d like to point out STEREO). Those speakers are of exceptional quality and can really make this the loudest mobile phone I ever owned.
There are also some unusual keys for a Series S60 and those are respectly a zoom In/Out dial a gallery button and a shutter release button. Those buttons are automatically lighted in a blue tint when the camera slider it’s open. There is also a Media Key typical of the N- Series that is used to call a programmable menu usually containing radio, media player and streaming stuff (Configurable). Active standby is also supported and enabled on the phone (to dos and useful applications in standby screen).
Connection to the external world is made by the infamous nokia pop-port located at the bottom of the unit. This means that the only headphones you could use are Nokia! Fortunately a good pair are included. They also sport a microphone a remote volume control and a select button to voicedial or change mp3s, radio stations on the fly.
The battery looks compact and robust. It is rated at 1100 mah and lasts approximately 2 days with normal use. The charger is the new type with the ridicule small plug.
Phone operations
The phones operates consistently as it should. Calls are received and answered as normal with the red and green key. This phone is a Quad Band and will operate in most world networks.
A nice addition is universal voice recognition to dial the contacts. You have no longer to train the phone with your voice but the phone recognises the contact name when you speak it and dials! This feature also works for selected programs embedded in the phone.
Writing SMS is very comfortable with the excellent T9 implementation by Nokia. The phone can be configured to access also POP3 and SMTP accounts in his messaging app, but I resorted not to configure this part of the service and skip to download directly the Google mail application. Included is the capability to write also MMS, this is the fourth phone I own that sports this ability that I never used and never plan to use anyway. There is a web browser and I’d have to say that this time nokia got it right. The embedded browser feels better than opera mobile which in turn was better than the embedded first series explorer.
CameraPhone
It looks like this phone is really into photography. 3 megapixels are not few. Operating the camera is as easy as sliding the cover in the open position. This reveals the lens and “flash” assembly. Actually the flash is a white led, don’t expect anything out of it.
When in camera mode the screen UI rotates and the zoom becomes active. In order to take a picture the shutter button has even the half press stop for the focus! Really feels like a digicamera. You can set the white balance, the ISO, the scene presets, flash mode, exposition and color tone. The pictures if taken in daylight are good quality. On the other hand in dark environments there are actually problems with the white balance and with the overall pixxellation of the scene.
There is a movie mode where the phone records video and audio instead of pictures in this case the flash is steady on. Movies are recorded in Mp4 and I think this can’t be easily edited…
The issue with the camera is the delay from opening the cover to the camera program actually running. It can take 5-6 seconds to take a shot from cold.
Media Player
The phone comes with 50Mb of internal memory. Given that this is not enough a external MiniSD can take media files. Those range from Mp3s to the casual DivX movies. All are played stereo courtesy of the speakers or of the headphones. If you need to change the media played a tap on the headphone’s button will switch the song or the radio station.
As I didn’t mention the phone is also a radio receiver with the visual radio stuff. I did’nt know what to do with it since where I live it is not implemented yet.
The screen compared to other Nokia Phones is really brighter and sharper. Also it is bigger in size even at the same resolution if compared with phones of the “E-“ series.
Computer Connection
The infamous nokia suite is working this time. It took them something like 3 years but at least I performed a full phone backup with no issues. To their merit it looks like the suite is now working even on older models! Still the suite is a resource hog and I really can’t appreciate the lurid system of music transfer.
Nokia offers some goods on the website and some of them come preinstalled on the phone. One of these is the Nokia maps application. I say don’t bother. Even with additional maps and a external gps unit I found nokia maps to be really slow to the point of being unsafe. If you need a GPS application I heard great things of TomTom mobile and even Route66 Mobile.
On a Mac things are different. As soon as you connect the phone with blue tooth a iSync profile is created and things go flawlessly syncing Contacts and Agendas.
On both platforms the phone can operate as a Modem. In this case expect a maximum speed of 380Kbps and no more!. (UTMS Standard).
Final Comments
This is a good phone. It can run tons of software! It has a camera though I find it very low quality when compared to my semi-pro equipment and I don’t really find it useful. It can perform VideoCalls and be a nice companion with the Radio and Mp3 player features. With the coming games from the new N-gage brand I don’t see a reason why not to buy it. In these 2 weeks I owned it I found it is quite a robust platform.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
eiapoce
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Reviews written: 42
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