Nokia N76 Review

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. The EDGE and UMTS connection helps for fast retrieving of Emails. In order to limit the generated traffic, you can set the phone to download the headers only, or to limit the size in KB.





Connectivity:

Nokia N76 is quad-band GSM/EDGE phone supporting UMTS 2100 MHz for 3G in Europe/Asia. As it doesn’t support America’s 3G bands, here it will work only as 2G phone but at least without any problem, thanks to the quad-band support.

It is ridiculous that A2DP profile is not supported! The phone has Bluetooth v2 and plays the music through any headset connected to it, including stereo ones, but plays them in mono, not in stereo and with low quality. Even stranger is the fact that N76 supports AVRCP profile, so you can control the phone through stereo headset (change songs, adjust the volume). Lacking A2DP is a step back, as phones on Symbian v9.1 didn’t supported it but Nokia N95 (v9.2) does.

Like most other Nokia phones, along with the N76 comes a CD with Nokia PC Suite. The version of the software is newer than the one coming with N95 and offers new interface, matching the style of the N76. It has the standard backup and synchronize, connecting the PC to the Internet via the phone, managing contacts, messages, multimedia and applications. Connecting is done without a problem, when using the miniUSB cable from the box (or any standard one) and choosing the PC Suite mode from the phone. In this mode we transferred 176 entries (contacts, to-do notes, etc) in just 10 seconds. If you choose Mass Storage, the phone’s memory will be displayed as a removable drive, in which you can copy any file.


Internet:

Thanks to the UMTS data and the QVGA resolution of the display, loading and viewing a standard HTML web pages is easy job. 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 d-pad, 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.