Nokia N73 Smartphone Review

Organizer:

The Organizer is spread into different submenus – the calendar is one of the icons in the main menu and it can be viewed by month or week. Of course, you can easily add notes to a particular day with a few clicks; To-Do notes and Meetings are also displayed on the homescreen if the corresponding option is turned on (see Interface). An alarm can be assigned to each entry in the calendar.


Other options like Calculator, Notes, and Converter are located in the Office menu. Notes are just annotations with no option for adding an alarm like the To-Do notes. The Converter works with various quantities (Length, Weight, etc.) but the interface has not changed much, compared to older versions, and working with various types is still inconvenient – entering different values requires a quite slow transition from one row to another, while choosing types is done from a drop-down list, which usually takes a lot of time. 

The calculator has no scientific option, like the one in the 6131, which is a lower level phone.

Nokia has been wise enough to add third party software that comes with every smartphone as that's a way to broaden the phone's capabilities – you have QuickOffice and PDF reader which help you out with the most frequently used document types. Unfortunately, the Office is still only a “viewer” and you cannot do any editing with it which is a major drawback. When viewing Word files, you can stylize the text by using various colors, highlighting, italic, bold and underline, but some powerpoint files do not display properly. During the tests we opened two presentations, and the one with the white background was displayed, whereas the color one (a MS Powerpoint preloaded one) could not load the background image. A simple Excel document could also be viewed, but when we tried opening more complex ones (various colors, a lot of columns and sheets), they just could not visualized, so the application looked practically useless.

The situation with the PDF Reader is even worse. It's clear you can not expect to edit anything with it, but its only option – viewing – is really awfully implemented. We tried opening a digital manual of the N73, downloaded straight from the manufacturer's site, and the N73 did not manage to open it at all. A document with only one text line looked dreadful when viewed as the font was small and hard to read. So using the phone for viewing more complicated documents of this type is hard, inconvenient and even pointless. As a whole, the office applications are there so that one can say they're present, but we think that they just cannot do what they're supposed to and thus they are simply useless.  

   
Alarms are located in a third menu - Clock. If fact, there's only one alarm, and it's set for a particular hour – Symbian S60 has no capability for duplication (unless you use 3rd party software). The World Clock is also located in this menu and you can add various cities that you like to view – that's very convenient and saves a lot of time compared to the standard way with “moving across the world map"..

The Tools menu houses the integrated File Manager which we would've liked to feature an improved navigation too. Unlike PPC phones, it does not resemble the explorer we know from PCs and working with files is not quite fast.

Messaging:

The Messages menu has nothing new to offer – you can easily compose SMS/MMS or Email and located in My Folder are templates which are handy for text that is often used in messages. The fast T9 can help you enter text quickly, but the keypad is an obstacle as it's quite uncomfortable so we'd prefer not to write too much messages. The EDGE and UMTS connection helps for faster retrieving of Emails.

Connectivity:

This is not the strongest feature of the N73 – the supported Bluetooth version is 2.0, but it's a shame that a multimedia device like that lacks the Advanced Audio Distribution (A2DP) Profile for stereo audio streaming, and you can't connect stereo wireless headphones to listen to your favorite music but must only use the ones with Pop-up Port, which means you should either buy an adaptor, or use Nokia accessory. The phone also has an IrDA port, located on the left side of the handset, and offers further capabilities for connectivity with other devices, but it's an outdated technology and it's present in very few phone models these days, so we find it unnecessary. Unfortunately, the N73 does not support Wi-Fi, which is a wireless network standard – it would have allowed access to Internet in all hotspots (places with such kind of network), as well as usage of IP telephony. Through Wi-Fi you can also stream music or video fast and free to your phone, or download some new multimedia content. Wi-Fi would have been also very useful if the carrier supported UMA – a service that's expected to be launched by T-Mobile USA, and which helps you to reduce your bill by using local wireless connections.
For over-the-air data you can connect through both 2G GPRS/EDGE or through 3G UMTS (no HSDPA support), but unfortunately the latter supports 2100MHz band only, which means it will work in Europe/Asia, but not in the US, where 850/1900MHz UMTS is needed.

Like most other Nokia phones, along with the N73 comes a CD with Nokia PC Suite. The software has a nice interface with logically structured and easy to use menus, but the options supported are nothing special – here we have the standard backup and synchronize, connecting the PC to the Internet via the phone, managing contacts, messages, multimedia and applications. Even if you've never used Nokia PC Suite you won't experience any troubles working with it and establishing a connection between the PC and the phone would be no problem with the USB cable provided with the N73. When connected to the USB cable, you can choose which mode the N73 should enter in: Media Player, PC Suite, Mass storage, or PictBridge. PC Suite is the one we've described above, while the Mass storage is most suitable for transferring lots of images, music or videos from the computer to the phone or vice versa – by using it we transferred 31MB for 45 seconds, which is speed of 1.45MB per second. The stupid thing is that this mode disables the phone functionality and you can miss a call while you transfer content. The PictBridge is used for direct printing of images through compatible printers.
 

Internet browser:

Thanks to the EDGE/UMTS data and the QVGA resolution of the display, loading and viewing a standard HTML webpage is a pleasure. The phone has no problem rendering all pages and reading phoneArena's news was a pleasure. Scrolling left-to-right and top-to-bottom is done with the phone's joystick, and a mini-map shows you, which part of the page you are looking at. The pages loaded pretty fast and as a whole, we had a great experience with the browser, so we definitely like it more than the Internet Explorer, built in Pocket PC phones based on Windows Mobile. The browser can load RSS feeds for even faster access to information. What we loved about it is the history: when you use 'back' to see pages you've seen earlier, you see the pages as thumbnails, you can open from the phone's cache.