Nokia N73: A Review
September 17th, 2006 | Published in tech | 20 Comments
Warning: Extensive post ahead
Nokia gave me a set of their new N-series phone, the N73, a few days before I left for India and Bangladesh. Having used it exclusively since early July, I was one of the earliest people to have the phone, even before it hit the market. I reserved my statements about the phone until this time as I didn’t want to do “yet another review”. For technical specifications you can go to the official website, or any of the mobile phone review sites. For your typical reviews, you’d be better off at CNet or similar. I took the phone only because I was interested in seeing what I could make it do. I’ve spent a long time with the phone ââ¬â about two months. It is quite possible that the only people who have used it as long as, or longer than I have, are Mr Brown and Mr Miyagi, who received the phones around the same time I did.
I got it two days before I flew to Bangalore, a timeline which caused some initial reservations as I didn’t think I could deliver a review on time, not knowing where I might be or what the state of internet access might be like; I wasn’t sure about the sort of conditions I would be going into, either. I was told to “take it with me and talk about how I used it”. I certainly put this phone through a lot of straining physical conditions, and tried to push it to its limits. As a photojournalist on assignment, I already had a few kilograms of gear to take with me: a portable computer, 10 gigabytes of compactflash cards, a digital SLR camera body with two lenses, and a small rangefinder that I like to shoot black and white film with. Together with the assortment of chargers, I wasn’t prepared to take another point and shoot with me, so I took the jump and decided to let the Nokia N73 do the job my Ixus usually does.
With 3.2 megapixels, together with Carl Zeiss Tessar f2.8/5.6 lens, it wasn’t a difficult decision to make. The integrated upload-to-Flickr feature made it even sweeter. Screen size is not a problem on this phone, coming in at 2.4 inches (side note: a size just 0.1 inches smaller than the LCD on my digital SLR). Colours are vivid and gorgeous. The first thing I noticed about this phone was how snug and tactile it felt in my hands. I’m not a phone connoisseur, but it feels sturdy. It’s not too light or flimsy, it just feels right.
I was pleased to find out the phone’s operating system is Symbian 9.1 with the 3rd edition S60 interface. (For nostalgic reasons: my very first PDA was a cool Psion Revo that ran on Symbian/EPOC, back in 1999. I’m also placing all my eggs on the Symbian basket, as opposed to the Windows Mobile one, obviously.) You can download all sorts of useful software, like OggPlay to play .ogg files, or the screenshot utility that is absolutely essential for me. The N73 makes connectivity a snap. It’s a quad-band 3G phone, has Bluetooth, and supports mini-SD cards of up to 2GB. With the additional mini-SD cards you can easily store and play songs (AAC, mp3, WMA, Real, are fine), images (JPEG, GIF, BMP, whatever I threw at it, they read fine), even videos (Real, MPEG-4, H.263, H.264). The only thing that’s missing, in my opinion, is wifi.
I have absolutely no experience with Nokia’s bundled PC Suite, as I’m on a Mac and the phone, like all other Bluetooth phones, was able to interface swiftly with my computers. Like all other Bluetooth phones, it took no brain activity whatsoever to start using OS X’s built-in Bluetooth utility to send and receive files between the phone and my computers. iSync connectivity could be better. I’m still using it with the little hack I found. Based on a recommendation in that post I’ve been using ZYB to remotely manage my contacts and calendar, and that’s been working very well.
Let the screenshots tell the story ââ¬â they’re fair more effective to convey a visual message about the useability experience behind this phone.
Primary screen of the N73, with shortcut bar across the screen.
Here is the main menu of the S60 interface.
A feature I found utterly indispensable: world clock. You can add a list of cities to your ‘favourite cities’, and everytime you move to another place you can switch cities, thus switching time zones, without making changes to the phone date and time settings, then quickly switching back when you’re home. Came in very useful for me.
Once you’ve taken a photo, you can automagically send it to Flickr in one easy step.
It takes you to a Flickr login screen. After this screen you merely enter the title, description, and tags of photos. Photos appear on your Flickr account upon upload. Couldn’t be easier.
View of Gallery containing photos and videos.
There is a basic editor, built-in. It allows you to crop, adjust brightness and contrast, make black and white or sepia, add text. There is also a built-in video editor by muvee but it’s quite stupid.
View of Adobe Reader reading a .pdf map.
View of QuickWord reading a Word document transferred from the computer.
Web browser, which is based on Apple’s Safari Web Kit.
Web-based RSS
Going from phone to camera takes only one swipe of the back panel, and about 2.5 seconds. The layout of camera controls is very easy to understand and intuitive ââ¬â they give you more control over the picture taking process, by letting you make exposure compensation (in stops of +/- 0.5EV), change white balance (auto, cloudy, sunny, incandescent/tungsten, fluorescent), change ISO (auto, low, mid, high). The moment the photo is taken you can send by Bluetooth or upload to a Flickr account, or perform basic editing (cropping, brightness adjustment). Image quality is excellent, with negligible noise and grain. Colours were vivid and accurate. Overall, this phone could be a serious contender for those of you looking to leave out an additional digital camera from your ‘daily gadgets’. I’ll let the images speak for themselves (look here for all pictures taken with the phone, mostly uploaded through the send-to-Flickr function, which means you can shoot and upload immediately).
I was traipsing around a limestone furnace in Cherrapunjee, Northeast India. The CMOS sensor on the N73 doesn’t fail me.
An evening drive through rural Bangladesh.
Great for after-dinner sights.
In pitch black conditions, such as in this bar in Bangkok, the flash manages to bridge the gulf between being too harsh and being ineffective. Colour temperature is accurate, without being too warm.
I can think of many uses for a tool such as the N73, mostly from how handy it is, and how excellent its image and video quality is. As a photojournalist used to hefty equipment, and used to arousing fear and suspicion amongst her subjects with said hefty equipment, with the phone within reach and easy operation I was able to quickly whip it out to record images and footage that would’ve otherwise been impossible to. Midway through my trip I became seized with the idea of making some quick footage of what I saw, for archival. The product of that was a small 6 minute video clip about travelling and being on the road. View it here.
September 17th, 2006 at 12:37 am (#)
[...] Popagandhi « Nokia N73: A Review [...]
September 17th, 2006 at 12:58 am (#)
There’s obviously a better camera in your N73 than in my N80. That being said, I still love my N80.
September 17th, 2006 at 1:33 pm (#)
Great review. I was wondering if you have found a good solution for syncing your photos and music to your computer. It seems like you are Mac based like me, so obviously the Nokia sofftware is not useful.
I have been using a piece of (FREE) software called iTuneMyWalkman.
It automatically grabs all of my photos and videos and puts them where i like on my Mac. It aslo transfers any songs on a specific playlist in iTunes. 80% there…
The only problem is - the songs just ’show up’ in the Nokia Gallery on my phone. They work! But they are not seen by the Music Player as a playlist.
I was wondering if you, or any of your readers had a better solution.
Cheers.
Michael
Link to software:
http://ilari.scheinin.fidisk.fi/itunemywalkman/
September 18th, 2006 at 7:24 am (#)
Hi Adri,
can you say any more about the camera focus and response times compared to, say, an equivalent digicam? Also, is there any chance of seeing an image at full resolution, to see what the noise and sharpness are like?
thanks
September 18th, 2006 at 11:24 am (#)
you know pop, you can sell me anything.
September 18th, 2006 at 11:50 am (#)
Hey Andrew.
If you go to Flckr and click ‘All Sizes’ on a given photo, you can usually see the full resolution original (you have to be logged in). I am not sure why hers are not. She may be posting lower res samples to save on Data Transfer.
You can look at my Flckr feed.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/72022104@N00/
Any photo tagged N73. I have really been trying to test the camera. Shooting sunsets, lots of lines, tough lighting. I have posted the full rez shots so you can see tearing etc.
Cheers.
Michael
September 18th, 2006 at 2:01 pm (#)
Hi Andrew, my Flickr settings were restricted previously ââ¬â only my contacts could view high-res images. My friends got tired of becoming wallpapersr on strangers’ computers (but that’s really their fault for being so goodlooking). Anyway, I’ve turned it back on, so as long as you’re logged in to Flickr you can view the images at a high resolution.
Camera focus: seems similar, to me, to regular digicams. AF is accurate. Macro-shooting is excellent (probably better than my IXUS for this purpose.. the macro preset actually works).
Response times: I felt it a little laggy at first but after I turned off instant 2 seconds playback, the phone, as a camera, was much snappier. Not a regular camera yet… but I can see it’s getting there. Maybe you’d like to go to a Nokia dealer to try it out.
Michael: Thanks for the recommendations. Your images are excellent.
mis_nomer: =) I hear that’s my… selling point.
September 18th, 2006 at 7:34 pm (#)
@Michael, thanks for that. I’d assumed that Adri had turned off the higher-res options, thus my question. But thanks for the link to your images.
@Adri, thanks too. I’m impressed by the lack of noise and the colour rendition. I have profiled my Macbook screen and the colours look pretty good. I do see what appears to be some over-agressive JPG compression: the boulders in the lower right of the limestone-link image appear blocky. The image of the image of the 2 of you is also quite soft — looks a bit like it’s been shot at lower res and upsampled — but I imagine that may be a slow shutter speed as much as anything else.
You must be getting a fair bit of traffic: those images have been viewed hundreds of times each.
FWIW, I promise that I have none of your friends as wallpaper on my computer.
September 28th, 2006 at 3:07 pm (#)
Michael, it seems you’re pretty knowledgable about the mac/n73 sync. I’ve got iSync working and I can drop and drag but having trouble with iTMW. Because the phone won’t mount how do you change the path to the phone’s memory card in iTMW?
I’m using Bluetooth. Is iTMW only functional with USB? Thanks.
September 29th, 2006 at 12:20 am (#)
Gbags.
For iTMW to work you have to mount your phone as a mass storage device.
In preferences for the iTMW app, under the ‘General’ tab, the first option is to modify the path to your memory card. Mine says:
/Volumes/N73/Sounds/Digital/
(I renamed my memory card ‘N73′)
Cheers.
September 30th, 2006 at 6:27 am (#)
I just stumbled across your site when I was searching for more information on the Nokia N73 (great review, btw! You seriously swayed me. Now I just need to know if I can really choke up the $500). It seems we have similar interest though! Like VIntage cameras. Mmmm :) I added you on flickr, btw!
October 4th, 2006 at 7:13 pm (#)
Michael,
I’ve tried to mount my phone but can’t. In the General prefs. the path is “/volumes/*/MSSEMC/Media\files/audio”. When I go to “Change . . .” it takes me to a window where I would choose the folder you suggested but my phone isn’t an option.
How do I mount the phone as a “mass storage device”. Any suggestions?
Cheers.
October 4th, 2006 at 9:23 pm (#)
Gbags:
When you connect your phone with the USB cable it will prompt you for which mode you want to take it into.
There’s Media Player, Lifeblog, etc, and “Mass Storage”.
Choose Mass Storage.
You will then see you phone mounted on your desktop.
When you start up itunemywalkman, to make it point to the actual path, click ‘change’ (as you mentioned) and WHILE your phone is mounted, simply navigate to where your phone is. My phone mounts as ‘Adri’, so when I click ‘change’, I click on ‘Adri’ on the Finder side-pane, and go to Sounds -> Digital.
That will change your path.
October 4th, 2006 at 9:23 pm (#)
You need the usb data cable, of course. Does it give you the option to mount as mass storage? I just did it for the first time today (didn’t have the cable before).
October 5th, 2006 at 8:09 pm (#)
Hmmm…stumbled across your website too while looking for reviews on N73 and connectivity with isync and macs…I was considering the Sony Ericsson k800i…but I’m afraid you’ve sold me on the N73!
Cheers!
December 3rd, 2006 at 8:41 pm (#)
Hi! N73 looks good. My wife has the N80 but she is unhappy with the quality of pictures taken by her mobile phone camera. I hope the N73 is a better bet.
Which has better service backup in India? Nokia or Sony Ericsson?
I have to decide between the N73 and the Sony Ericsson K790i.
Any tips would be really appreciated.
December 4th, 2006 at 2:30 am (#)
Which metro do you live in/are closest to? I would think that Nokia has a far bigger presence, I have seen Nokia care centres in most metros including bangalore, mumbai, kolkata, i’m sure it’s in delhi too. I even saw them in shillong (i think). The N73 is leaps and bounds better than the N80 in terms of photo quality; it was made to be more ‘camera’ than ‘phone’, and it’s the only N series phone to be so. Good luck!
December 7th, 2006 at 7:37 pm (#)
[...] When you try to identify the Short Head of a Micro Niche of the Long Tail (SHoMNoLT?!?!) and approach them for (unbiased) product tryouts (a la Nokia with several bloggers), you are taking a traditional PR approach. Get your word out. Get your product out. Make noise! [...]
January 17th, 2007 at 10:27 am (#)
how do i get the shortcut bar across my screen?
January 17th, 2007 at 10:36 am (#)
all right, i found out.
go to settings–>phone–>active standby–>on