Overview
Introduction
The Nokia N73 is an upgrade to the very successful Nokia N70 model, released around the 3rd quarter last year. The N73 brings some firsts from Nokia to the market, and is one of the first handsets to be released from the new N-range announced back in April this year.
As with all of the N-range handsets from Nokia, the N73 is a high-end business productivity handset in a very sophisticated package. That’s not to say you can’t have any fun with the handset though, it has some great multimedia functions too.
New/outstanding features
The stand out feature on the N73 from the word go has got to be the Carl-Zeiss optics 3.2mpx digital camera. The camera shoots still images up to 2048 x 1536 pixels and is also capable of recording MPEG4 format video clips. With autofocus, a dedicated LED flash light, and many settings available for fine tuning your image capture, the camera is absolutely amazing. Check out the camera performance section on page 2 for more information, including pictures and sample video clips.
Now moving on to some of the other features of the handset, like the QuickOffice document viewers, media player application, Bluetooth v2.0, Symbian 9.1 OS with Nokia Series 60 interface and the hot-swappable miniSD memory card expansion slot.
For working on the go there’s nothing better than being able to receive e-mail messages from your work accounts and take a quick look at attachments before even getting to the office. The N73 gives you the ability to do this, with the QuickOffice application suite consisting of a viewer for Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint presentations. The handset also comes with a preinstalled Adobe Portable Document Format (aka PDF) file viewer. As mentioned the e-mail client does support attachments, and with high speed 3G connectivity downloading large files isn’t a problem.
The multimedia player on the N73 supports the most common audio and video formats like MPEG4, MP3, 3GPP, and AAC. Streaming video and audio can also be played back through the application, and most 3G providers have a host of these services on their WAP pages for a small free (be it monthly or a once-off). Multimedia can be transferred from a PC or other mobile device by way of Bluetooth v2.0, Infrared, or using the included USB 2.0 data-cable (Pop-Port™ connector).
The N73 is powered by one of the world’s favourite Smartphone operating systems, Symbian. Version 9.1 of the OS is installed on the N73, which although not the latest version (latest at time of writing is 9.3) it’s the most stable and offers features like a multithreaded kernel for power-efficiency, rich multimedia functionality, and a wide range of API’s for further development. The N73 comes with the Nokia Series 60 3rd edition platform, one of the leading Smartphone platforms in the world.
Physical aspects
The Nokia N73 is quite a large handset, but oddly enough it’s not actually that heavy. The actual dimensions of the handset come in at 110 x 49 x 19mm, and around 116grams. This is fairly decent for a Smartphone and most people won’t have any size-issues with this handset. Finally, mainstream 3G capable handsets are getting smaller!
I mentioned in the introduction that the N73 is an upgrade of the N70, and that can’t be more obvious than in the design of the handset. It’s the same basic candy-bar design, but the N73 is a tad larger than the older N70 handset. One thing that I couldn’t quite get my head around was the gap between where the display ends and where the keys start on the front of the handset. Perhaps it’s there for the display interface cables but to me it just looks weird!
The keys on the N73 are reasonably small and it does take some time to get used to not hitting three at a time when you really only want one. There’s the regular 0 – 9, *, and # keys, two soft keys, hang-up and pick-up keys, a 5-way navigational stick, and four extra keys on the sides of the numerical buttons. The top key on the left side is for the main menu, and the one below it is for changing input type – numerical, T9 sentence, T9 lower, T9 upper, and multi-tap method. I wouldn’t mind this key being replaced with something a tad more functional, as the only time you really use it is during messaging and most people would be too used to pressing # anyway. The right hand side top key is the multimedia menu, and the bottom is the backspace key.
The multimedia menu key gets in the way quite a bit, especially when you’re just getting used to the size of the numerical keys for messaging. For the first couple of days I used to hit the multimedia key instead of the backspace key, which brings up the multimedia menu (full screen and animated), and then I’d stupidly hit the hang-up button which would save my message in drafts and then go back to the standby screen. To get back to my message I’d have to go through the menu and find it, then start editing again. The same goes for pressing the pick-up button when you’ve input a number, which is just above of the multimedia key.
You’ll have trouble finding the miniSD port on the N73 on the sides of the handset – it’s been moved to the bottom where the Pop-Port™ is positioned. At first I couldn’t quite figure out how to open the cover but you just have to put your nail in the insert and then pull directly outwards. It’s quite tricky (as I’ll mention later in the appropriate section).
The left hand side of the handset has the infrared port on its lonesome. It’s a little busier on the right hand side, with the volume/zoom up & down keys, a dedicated gallery key, and the two-stage camera shutter key.
The N73 comes in either ‘Silver Grey/Deep Plum’ or ‘Frost White/Metallic Red’, or what I like to call orange or red. Both colour schemes are quite elegant.
User interface & display
The Nokia N73 uses the Series 60 third edition platform with the Symbian 9.1 Operating System. Symbian and Nokia’s Series 60 platform go hand in hand, and are used in a large range of Smartphone handsets. Nokia leases its Series 60 platform to companies like LG and Samsung for their Smartphone handsets.
At first glance of the N73 there’s no mistaking the massive LCD display, which takes up almost all of the front of the handset. The TFT LCD support 262,144 colours and has a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels (QVGA). I can’t say a bad word about this display – it’s extremely crisp, has just the right amount of brightness, and is magnificent for viewing captured images or video and using the camera application.
The first thing you’re going to nice about the user interface, unfortunately, will be the lag. After waiting for the phone to boot up you’ll notice general lag within the menus and most functions including the camera and gallery applications. It’s really unfortunate for a handset like the N73 which has so much going for it!
Moving on from that though, the user interface is very nice to use and the 3rd edition of the Series 60 platform should be pretty familiar to most. It uses a mostly icon/list format menu, although some menus (like settings) are tabbed for easy access using the left/right navigational keys. The interface is fully themeable, and the handset comes with several themes already installed. If you’d like more you can download them onto your computer and transfer to the handset, download via WAP, or even make your own with software on your computer.
Worth mentioning here is the gallery application that the Nokia N73 uses to display images and video. There’s a dedicated gallery button on the left hand side of the handset, and for good reason! There’s no doubt most users will be capturing countless images with the integrated 3.2mpx digital camera. The application is horizontally aligned (like the camera application) and provides a rotary effect with thumbnails of your images and video on the side, and a larger portion at the top for the selected image. At the centre of the display under the larger thumbnail is a listing of the photo/video info – date and time captured, file name, size, and memory location.
The great thing about this application is that it automatically finds all video and images on the handset, so you don’t have to go searching around to find that one image which may be stored in a peculiar location. The “Ken Burns effect” of automatic pan and zoom is also a feature of the gallery application, which is a great little feature. More on the “Ken Burns effect” can be found here
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_Burns#Ken_Burns_Effect.
Making and receiving calls
Unlike some of Nokia’s other 3G handsets, the Nokia N73 is fully compatible with video-calling and has a dedicated inward-facing VGA camera located above the display. Regular audio calling is also offered, by way of the earpiece, the loudspeaker, or the included stereo headset. There are two volume control keys on the right hand side of the handset for easy volume adjustment in-call.
The N73’s video calling interface is quite simple, but this should please most people. If you want to start a video call you just have to press the “options” button and then select video call. This option will appear when you input a number at the idle screen or browse over a name/number in your contacts. The video call interface displays the current video being sent, and the video being received. From the options menu you can disable sending video, audio sending, or both video and audio sending, turn the handset earpiece on (by default it will be loudspeaker if a headset is not plugged in), end the call, use the 3.2mpx camera on the back of the handset, swap the images around (so the sending video is bigger than the receiving video), or zoom in.
One feature I would have liked to have included is an image send function where instead of streaming video the handset streams a still image.
The N73 has separate pick-up and hang-up keys, but if you select a contact or input a number and then hit the pick-up key it will only initiate a voice call. Video calls must be started ‘manually’. The hang-up key does however work in video calls and all other menus (to get back to the idle screen).
Loudspeaker volume was a little low and could be increased, as it was quite hard to hear the person if you were driving a car. The earpiece volume is fine (maximum was too loud for me, it was at about ¾ most times), and using a Bluetooth headset is flawless. As I mentioned the N73 comes with a stereo headset which can be used for calling, and is probably your best bet over the loudspeaker if you’re only using it to act as a hands free.
Messaging
SMS/EMS, MMS, e-mail, and instant messaging with T9 predictive text are all supported on the Nokia N73 Smartphone. The common-inbox is back, so all SMS/EMS and MMS messages will be put into the one inbox for easy accessibility. A separate application is used for e-mail messaging.
The traditional Series 60/Symbian SMS composition interface is used on the N73, with a small box at the top of the screen for name/number of recipient(s), and then a larger box occupying the rest of the screen for the actual message body. At the top of the display you can see which text input method is being used, characters left, and current message number. When you hit send on the handset the message window closes and you are taken back to the previous screen. Messages can be forwarded through the options menu and even printed through a compatible Bluetooth printer.
MMS composition is simple with a similar interface to the text messaging one. Video clips, images, sounds, and animations can be added through the options menu, which also gives you the ability to capture a new image or video clip from the camera instead of choosing one stored on the memory. Templates are included for the text portion of the messages.
The e-mail application is fast and offers many specialty features. It supports POP3, IMAP4, and SMTP protocol mailboxes, and more than one mailbox can be defined on the handset. If you have more than one mailbox defined they can all be checked at the one time. The N73 allows you to define what to do when new messages are picked up on the server – download headers only, download first x kilobytes, or download the entire message (without attachments). There is also a scheduler type application which can be used to define what days of the week to check which e-mail accounts, and so forth.
A big downside for messaging on the N73 is the lack of support for push e-mail services like BlackBerry. Most of the Nokia E-series handsets have this functionality, and as more and more service providers are bringing push e-mail the masses people are really becoming aware of what a great convenience it is.
Connectivity
The usual set of Smartphone connectivity options are built-in to the Nokia N73. Starting with local connectivity there’s Bluetooth, Infrared, and USB 2.0 (via Pop-Port™ interface). For remote connectivity the N73 offers WCDMA data, GPRS, and EDGE, providing a full set for connectivity on both 3G and 2G networks.
All connectivity settings are located in their own folder from the main menu. This is also where most connectivity protocols are turned on/off (like Bluetooth and Infrared). The Bluetooth on the N73 is v2.0 compliant and includes a heap of Bluetooth profiles for connecting to the latest devices. Searching for and pairing other Bluetooth devices is easy and done direct from the Bluetooth option in the connectivity folder.
As for USB, the Nokia N73’s Pop-Port™ is fully USB 2.0 compliant for high speed data transfer. You’ll really notice the difference if your old handset only used USB 1.0 – transferring large files like video or audio is a breeze. The N73 also has PictBridge support, so using the included data-cable you can plug the N73 directly into a compatible printer and print photos without the need for a computer. The USB Mass Storage Device profile is included for easy drag & drop of files to the memory card on the N73. When you connect the N73 to the USB data-cable the handset will prompt you to select from four options: PictBridge, Mass Storage Device, PC Suite, or Music Mode. If you want to use the included PC Suite software select the PC Suite mode, else it won’t work or you may get some errors.
The N73 can synchronize with Microsoft Outlook (2000, 2002, 2003), Outlook Express, Lotus Organizer (5.0, 6.0), Lotus Notes (5.0, 6.0). Calendar, contacts, to-do, notes, and e-mails can be synchronized. The PC Suite application that comes on the CD included in the sales package also has synchronization abilities.
Unfortunately the N73’s battery cannot be charged via USB, which was a bit of a pain if you don’t have the charger on you and just want a quick charge.
The WCDMA protocol on the N73 supports downstream data up to 384kbp/s and upstream up to 128kbp/s. Circuit data up to 64kbp/s is used for video calling on the handset.
When roaming onto 2G networks you can still access WAP pages, send/receive e-mail, and perform other tasks with either GPRS or EDGE OTA protocols. Although not nearly as fast as WCDMA, these protocols still allow you to get the job done.
The N73 is a quad-band GSM handset, automatically switching between the GSM 850, 900, 1800, and 1900MHz bands. This will basically cover you anywhere you want to go around the world with the N73.
Build quality
I mentioned earlier that although the N73 is quite a large handset (as is almost every 3G handset), it’s actually not that heavy – weighing only 116 grams. The handset is therefore very ‘compacted’ if you will, and feels very solid in hand. The only moving part is the camera cover and the miniSD memory card slot, which are both very securely attached.
The camera cover slider on the back of the handset is very smooth and gives a definite ‘click’ when in place (closed and open). The actual mechanism is quite smart, there are two small contacts built onto the actual handset, and the back cover has a flat strip of similar material, so when the camera cover slides down the two touch and complete a circuit (which in turn will start the camera application). This very simple idea saves the back cover having any circuitry and will therefore be quite cheap to replace if anything was to ever happen to it.
The miniSD placement on the N73 is different, and in my opinion, a very welcomed change! It leaves the sides of the handset to look very simple (the left hand side of the N73 only has the small black infrared port) and keeps the business-end of things at the bottom of the handset, out of the way. Mind you, any hot-swappable memory card slot is welcome in my books!
The SIM card and battery on the N73 sit in without dramas, and the battery is very easy to remove because of the small indent in the handset which lets your nail fit in to lift the battery up. The SIM card holder is your regular slide-in format.
Battery life
The N73 uses a single lithium-ion 1100mAh battery pack to keep it powered. Estimations from Nokia say 226 minutes talk time on WCDMA (3G) networks, and 246 on GSM (2G) networks. For standby time it’s about 370 hours on WCDMA networks and 350 hours on GSM networks. As far as video calling goes, the estimate is around 150 minutes. Nokia have also provided other battery statistics for a fully charged battery – around 800 3.2mpx images can be shot, video capture (CIF 15fps) up to 186 minutes, 336 minutes of video playback (CIF 15fps), and music playback (in offline mode) of around 12.6 hours.
In real life the battery seemed to last me around 4-5 days with pretty regular phone calls/messaging and camera usage. Camera usage would make up a huge part of the battery life consumption because of the full screen display and the sheer resolution of the images captured.
One annoying thing about the power management on the N73 is that the handset is quite fond of not warning you when you have a low battery, and then just turning off without warning. Most other handsets beep quite loudly or display a message saying that battery life is running low before they die – but not the N73! The N73 will also not turn back on if the battery life is low – which is different from some handsets which will start to turn on but die half-way through.
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Take a closer look!
Take a closer look!
Overview (Page 1)
