Ok, so I'll start off as usual with a link to the product page- https://nokia.com/nseries/index.html?loc=inside,main_n73
You can read about all the features that it has right there.
Now for the actual review. Please note that I'm not going over each and every feature-there are many things here that are common to all S60 devices which I've glossed over.
I bought this phone after getting rid of my older N91-which I'd bought just 3 months before. The reason being it had absolutely terrible firmware and bugs, and the internal hard disk went corrupt more than once. This phone ships with a 128 MB memory card.
Ergonomics: Lookswise, this phone resembles the SE K750i, with a larger than normal screen (QVGA, ie. 240x320 pixels instead of the standard 176x208 found on other Nokia S60 phones) and 262k colors.
As with most Nokias, it is easy to grip and incredibly lightweight. A sliding cover protects the main camera lens and flash assembly. The keys are large and soft to press, comfortable to type on.
Key placement is not so good-the C key to erase text is located at the bottom right and is a bit awkward to press. A new customizable multimedia shortcut key on the right side offers quick access to 4 applications. Additionally, there are dedicated keys along the side for camera shutter, instant image gallery preview, and two more buttons that act as volume and camera zoom adjustors.
The memory card slot is awkwardly placed near the bottom, the tab holding it seems kind of flimsy, so you need to be careful while opening it.
Software:The phone uses the Series 60 3rd edition operating system-which means there aren't (as of this writing) that many applications or themes available for it. The phone is very responsive and easy to use.
New features :
Active standby mode - This feature began with the 6680 and all N series phones have it-a set of 5 or 6 customizable app shortcuts are displayed on screen in standby mode. This can be turned off to show a plain screen as before.
The list of SMSes now shows the time/date of each message as well.
Sleep mode- After a few minutes of idle time, the entire screen switches off, and a small blue LED behind the light sensor blinks every few seconds to indicate that the phone is on. This helps conserve battery power. The light sensor is a standard feature that adjusts the screen brightness depending on ambient light. You can change its sensitivity in Settings-Phone-Display.
-Nokia now has a brand new full web browser called 'Web' available under the 'Applications' folder. This browser displays full websites exactly as they appear, with javascript and everything enabled. It also supports RSS feeds, automatically detecting if a site provides them, and letting you add subscriptions. The best feature is a mini thumbnail view-a small window over a thumbnail of the web page so that you can quickly select the area of it you want to see.
In addition, theres a wap browser called 'services' which is meant for viewing wap sites.
Pre installed applications: The phone comes with a mini app called 'downloads'. This is basically a set of links to download applications offered by other vendors, some of which are free. The free ones are Yahoo! Go, Mobipocket book reader, F-Secure antivirus. You have to download these by clicking on the links-they are free to use.
Settings wizard: One of the best tools provided- this thing simply asks you to choose country and phone operator, and will autoconfigure your GPRS/MMS/data access points, as well as email accounts. There's no need to manually key in all the parameters. It supports creation of accounts for gmail, aol and even Indian providers like rediffmail and satyam!
Apart from these, there's a new Search application, that lets you search the web using yahoo or Windows Live, and loads the results in the web browser mentioned before.
Yahoo Go! is totally cool-lets you access mail, messenger, addressbook and other services. The app fully integrates with the phone, it can sync your addressbook with the yahoo one, check email in the background and alert you when you get new mail or chat messages. Since it runs in the background-you might want to turn off automatic updating to conserve your data usage bills.
Mobipocket reader is the best ebook reader for hand held devices-it deserves a separate review which I'll write some other time! Just download it if you like reading ebooks on the go.
F-Secure antivirus for mobiles caused problems for me. Firstly I don't know why one needs antiviruses on phones anyway-viruses spread primarily via bluetooth, or downloading infected MMSes. Stay away from unknown messages and you'll be fine.
So when I installed F-Secure, it ran in the background, but the phone would crash on incoming calls, and I had to uninstall it.
3D ringtones: This is one of those 'so cool' features. It applies fade in/out and reverb effects to certain types of ringtones.
Office applications: The phone has QuickOffice, a set of viewers for MS Office documents (no editing, sorry) and Adobe Acrobat Reader for mobiles. Other than this, the usual calculator and converter found on other similar phones.
Games: There are 2 games, Sudoku and 3D snake. 3D snake is the good old Nokia snake in 3D, with sound effects.
Battery life: After using the browser, Yahoo Go! running in the background, and a 1.5 hour conversation, the battery indicator was down only to 4 notches from the total of 6. I haven't really tested this feature well, but I'd say the battery is good.
Speakers: Unique to this phone, are a set of stereo speakers, located along the top and bottom of the device. The sound quality is crystal clear-even better than the N91 which was marketed as a music phone!
Music player: The built in music player works like a media library, will scan the memory card and detect available songs. If songs have tags, it sorts them by artist, album etc. It also has graphic equalizer presets, and you can define your own.
USB cable mode:Like the N91 (ok, so I'm mentioning it again!), the data cable can be connected in 3 modes-
PC Suite mode for synchronizing with PC suite
Media player mode for synchronizing songs with Win media player
Mass storage mode- Here the phone prompts you to go off the network, then Windows detects the card as a 128 MB disk drive, so you can directly copy stuff to/from it. This is much faster than the usual PC suite mode, and the best advantage is you don't need to install PC suite on the target PC-it's totally plug n play. So with just the USB cable, you can carry the phone around and use it for file storage.
Visual Radio:Again the same radio found in all Nokia phones, nothing different. The 'visual' comes from the ability to show content for each radio station for the song being played. As of this writing, only Radio Mirchi supports this feature, that too in Delhi and couple of other places only.
The dumb thing is since it's a separate app, you can't use the graphic equalizer to change the sound here.
Continued in comments..GRRR, WHY DOES MS RESTRICT INPUT TO 7500 CHARS?
