Home page
News
Reviews
Phones (all)
Carriers (all)
Forum
Glossary
Phone filter
Compare
Reviews icon
Nokia N76 Review
Camera:
The N76 has a 2-megapixel camera on its back, which is a necessity nowadays. Its lens is neither autofocus, nor with Carl Zeiss branding, clearly showing that the camera is not the phone’s key feature. You can use either of the displays for a viewfinder, but it is recommended to use the internal one which is bigger and of higher quality. The options are identical to those of the N95, due to the same operating system, and so, the N76 has more features than the N93i. Interesting options are a few scene modes including night photo, night portrait, Sports, Close-up. There's an option for more than one color scenes and white balance, but the latter still lacks manual tuning.
The interface starts for 3 and taking and saving a picture takes only 4. This is faster than Nokia’s top cameraphone, the N95.
The camera is not the best on the market, but works OK. Outdoors, your photos will be underexposed, and with not saturated colors. Indoor images have very low quality, and lots of noise. The flash should be used when it is dark, but it’s very weak and useless.
The camcorder is not as good as those of the N95 and N93(i) and captures QVGA videos in MPEG4 format instead of VGA, which is 4 times bigger resolution. Still, their quality is high enough for previewing on a computer and the resolution is the standard one using in most online video blogs, like YouTube for example.
The pictures taken can be viewed from the Gallery. It displays a single image at the center of the display, which is surrounded by small thumbnails of the other images in the phone. Navigating left-to-right, the images move at the center position to be displayed in bigger size. It's nice that the phone caches different sizes of every image, so they load pretty fast once you've previewed them in the gallery.
The multimedia shortcut acts as the one of older Symbian phones, like the N73 – it gives you 5 shortcuts, for each side of the d-pad respectively. You won’t find the more fashionable landscape menu, like the one of the N95.
Multimedia:
The phone naturally comes with headphones in the box, but can also play the music through the speaker, which is also used for the incoming ringing alert. As it was already mentioned, the sound coming from this speaker is not very strong but clear.
The music player interface is the same as the one of the N95, which is much more convenient than the one of the Symbian version 9.1. The functionality has been preserved, but the navigation is more rational. The interface has been optimized for landscape, but it can also be used in portrait orientation without problems. The navigation is assigned to the d-pad directions and therefore you don’t have to shift through the small icons as was the case with N73, for example.
The Music Library menu allows you to sort the songs by Artist, Album, Genre, Composer. You can also create playlists.
The music player works fine in background mode thanks to the multitasking capabilities of the smartphone, while the homescreen displays the songs that are playing and the time elapsed. By pointing at it you are allowed to adjust the sound volume of the player without even opening it but you can not pause it or change to the next track. In order to do this, use the music keyboard on the top.
In addition to the Music Player comes the built in FM tuner. It is nothing extraordinary but allows you to listen to local FM stations, delivering music or audio information (news for example) over the air. The interface is standard and allows for saving of a few stations to your "favorite" list. As always, wired headphones should be attached in order to be used as an antenna for the phone.
The viewing of video files is a real pleasure on the phone’s display. The processor does a very good job and we monitored no delay with an encoded 320x240 pixels video clip, as was the case with some other smartphones.
Software:
The phone can use applications based both on the Java platform and Symbian S60, which provides wide 3rd party software compatibility. Installation is a piece of cake, while additional programs increase the phone's capabilities and it can be personalized to better suit you. The N76 comes preloaded with 3D Snakes game.
The internal memory of the device is just 26MB, so you should get a microSD card to store your music on. The slot is located next to the charging socket and is hot swappable, which means you can replace the cards while the phone is on.
Nokia N76 Review
Published on: 14 June, 2007 by PhoneArena Team
| Camera interface |
The N76 has a 2-megapixel camera on its back, which is a necessity nowadays. Its lens is neither autofocus, nor with Carl Zeiss branding, clearly showing that the camera is not the phone’s key feature. You can use either of the displays for a viewfinder, but it is recommended to use the internal one which is bigger and of higher quality. The options are identical to those of the N95, due to the same operating system, and so, the N76 has more features than the N93i. Interesting options are a few scene modes including night photo, night portrait, Sports, Close-up. There's an option for more than one color scenes and white balance, but the latter still lacks manual tuning.
The interface starts for 3 and taking and saving a picture takes only 4. This is faster than Nokia’s top cameraphone, the N95.
The camera is not the best on the market, but works OK. Outdoors, your photos will be underexposed, and with not saturated colors. Indoor images have very low quality, and lots of noise. The flash should be used when it is dark, but it’s very weak and useless.
| Outdoor images | |||
| Strong light | Medium light | Low light | |
| Indoor images | |||
| Camcorder interface |
The multimedia shortcut acts as the one of older Symbian phones, like the N73 – it gives you 5 shortcuts, for each side of the d-pad respectively. You won’t find the more fashionable landscape menu, like the one of the N95.
Multimedia:
The phone naturally comes with headphones in the box, but can also play the music through the speaker, which is also used for the incoming ringing alert. As it was already mentioned, the sound coming from this speaker is not very strong but clear.
The music player interface is the same as the one of the N95, which is much more convenient than the one of the Symbian version 9.1. The functionality has been preserved, but the navigation is more rational. The interface has been optimized for landscape, but it can also be used in portrait orientation without problems. The navigation is assigned to the d-pad directions and therefore you don’t have to shift through the small icons as was the case with N73, for example.
The Music Library menu allows you to sort the songs by Artist, Album, Genre, Composer. You can also create playlists.
The music player works fine in background mode thanks to the multitasking capabilities of the smartphone, while the homescreen displays the songs that are playing and the time elapsed. By pointing at it you are allowed to adjust the sound volume of the player without even opening it but you can not pause it or change to the next track. In order to do this, use the music keyboard on the top.
| FM Radio | Video player |
The viewing of video files is a real pleasure on the phone’s display. The processor does a very good job and we monitored no delay with an encoded 320x240 pixels video clip, as was the case with some other smartphones.
The phone can use applications based both on the Java platform and Symbian S60, which provides wide 3rd party software compatibility. Installation is a piece of cake, while additional programs increase the phone's capabilities and it can be personalized to better suit you. The N76 comes preloaded with 3D Snakes game.
The internal memory of the device is just 26MB, so you should get a microSD card to store your music on. The slot is located next to the charging socket and is hot swappable, which means you can replace the cards while the phone is on.
advertisement:
advertisement: