Nokia N73 Review
The high-spec 3G smartphone with a fantastic camera, music
player, FM radio, video calling and loads of memory. Compact and
lightweight for a Symbian phone, N73 brings smartphone
technology into the mainstream. Early versions of the firmware
were problematic, but the latest cells seem to be much more
reliable.
Nokia N73 updates the Nokia N70 3G SmartPhone. N73 is a lot
thinner than the N70 and weighs less as well, making it one of
the lightest smartcells. It has a conventional boxy design with
a regular keypad very similar to the N70. The keys are a little
too small for large fingers to use easily and the joystick can
be fiddly too. The display is very large with an amazing 240 x
320 pixel resolution and 262,000 colours. Its one of the best
displays on any smartphone.
As well as upgrading the display, Nokia have upgraded the camera
in a big way. N73 sports a 3.2 megapixel camera using the same
Carl Zeiss optics and CMOS sensor that made the N70 a powerful
imaging device. The camera has a built-in flash, 20x digital
zoom, macro mode, plenty of optional settings and a photo
editor. It doesn't perform quite as well as the best camera
cells from Sony Ericsson, but it significantly outperforms its
predecessor and is a very good camera. Video recording is at CIF
resolution with a framerate of 15 frames per second. Usefully
video can be recorded in either 3GP or MPEG4 formats. A video
editor application is included. There's a second inward-facing
VGA camera for making video calls.
N73 is also a great music device. It has a music player that
supports a wide range of formats including MP3, WMA and AAC, and
also an FM radio with Visual Radio functionality to display
information about the artist and track playing. The music player
supports playlists and an equalizer lets you adjust sound
quality. Sound is through dual stereo speakers or using the
stereo headset supplied.
The internal memory has been expanded to 42 Mbytes and there's
support for a hot-swapable miniSD card. This will provide bags
of room for storing music tracks and videos, making full use of
the possibility to record videos of up to 90 minutes in length.
Connectivity is via Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0 and infrared. Battery
life is very good for a 3G phone.
As always with Series 60 cells, the complexity of the software
means that they are usually slow to start, slow when browsing
menus, and can be prone to crash. Read through our user reviews
below and you will see that the number one complaint about N73
is the problem of the phone freezing or shutting down, often
when receiving a call. This is quite a common complaint in fact,
and for this reason we have deducted two stars from our overall
rating. A phone that doesn't work is not acceptable, however
good it may be when it actually works! You might consider the
Sony Ericsson K800i as an alternative, although it's not a
Symbian phone. If you want a Nokia, but have been put off the
Nseries by this review, you might like the Nokia 6300, which has
most of the functionality of N73, but isn't a Smartphone and is
much more reliable and user friendly.
The latest versions of the firmware do seem to be fixing the
reliability problems however, and Nokia are very good at making
new firmware releases available. N73 is such a capable phone
that you might want to take a risk, particularly as there are
now such good offers available on new contracts
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