Nokia E73 – Outdated UI
Thumbs up:
Sturdy feel, good value for money, free turn by turn navigation.
Thumbs down:
UI is outdated, browser is pretty bad, optical pad is awful
The Whiz Kid Speaks:
Nokia E73 is based on GSM 850/ 900/ 1800/ 1900 and HSDPA 850/ 900 / 1900 / 2100. The phone is powered by ARM 11,600 MHz processor. The dimensions are 115 x 58.9 x 12.8 and its weight is 126 grams. E73 has a 2.4 inches screen with 320×240 pixels resolution and support for 16 million colors. It also has accelerometer. The internal memory is 250 MB and the microSD card slot can take up to 32 GB memory cards. The phone is powered by 1200 mAh lithium ion battery. It has standby time of 600 hours and rated talk time is 450 minutes.
Supported video formats are H.263, MPEG-4, H.264/AVC, Flash Video, WMV, RealVideo 7,8,9/10. Supported audio formats are AAC, AMR-NB, AAC+, AU, AMR-WB, eAAC+, MIDI Tones (poly 64), M4A, MP4, MP3, True tones, RealAudio 7, 8, 10, SP-MIDI, WMA, WAV. Voice support features include Dialing, Comand, Recording, Speaker. Connectivity options include HSDPA, Wi-Fi/WLAN, 3G, EDGE, GPRS, Bluetooth, USB port. The phone is based on Platform/OS Symbian 9.3 – S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 2. Java (J2ME) Yes, MIDP 2.1 CLDC 1.1. There are other applications like Nokia Maps 3.0, A-GPS, Flash Lite v3.0.
The phone has a 5.0 megapixel camera with maximum resolution of 2,592×1,944 pixels. It has 4x digital zoom. Extra camera features include Auto Exposure, Auto-focus, Flash, Extended Depth of Field, Red-Eye Reduction, Full Screen Viewfinder, Sequence Mode, and Self Timer. The camera also records video at 640×480 pixels resolution at 30 fps.
Razzle Dazzle:
Nokia E73 is a little more than ten mm thick and in the hand, it feels thinner. Maybe that is because of the creative curves on the back. The battery compartment is covered by a solid metal piece which is solid but easily attracts a lot of fingerprints. Keep a small cleaning cloth close by for cleaning the fingerprints if you are a hygiene freak. E73 also feels quite solid because of its external body. Even the higher end N900 and N97 feel plasticiky as compared to this.
Inside Dope:
It has been two years since we last saw a smartphone from Nokia. The manufacturer hasn’t got any phones after E71 which was considered as the best Nokia phone ever to date. That was quite true simply because touch screen phones hadn’t come that popular back then and people were fans of the numeric keypads.
Nokia E73′s keyboard could have been better though, it has straight rows. We’d preferred a curved layout like the ones seen on most QWERTY handsets like BlackBerry. The keys are well contoured but they don’t have that satisfying click to them. Above the keyboard, there are the navigation keys which also look a bit weird. This is one area where E73 has gone one step behind E71; the shortcuts keys for Mail, Address Book, Calendar and Home are not delineated anymore. They are made up of the same plastic pieces as the soft and Send/End keys. At the center, you have the four way navigation pad along with an optical pad in the center. We thought Nokia got a bit too ambitious when they went for both the rocker button and optical pad. They should have used just one but two is a bit hard to handle. Fortunately, you can turn off the optical pad and use the ring just like E71.
Nokia E73 has a QVGA display which is getting quite obsolete. Same can be said about the processor. E73 phone has a front facing camera so you can make video calls through this. The process is quite similar to any S60 phone so you will get hang of it pretty quickly. In our tests, it was a bit sloppy though. We were disappointed that you cannot make calls through Skype or anything alike. You only get Fring but it is not that user friendly. We would recommend you to stick with voice at least till they revamp Fring.
On the back, there is a five megapixel camera along with LED flash. This is really good considering the Nokia E73 is more of a business device. We would have loved a two position camera button but Nokia went for shutter lag and autofocus. Picture quality is really good, better than what we expected. There is a little noise but that is not unexpected. Photos are compressed in JPEG format and this keeps the distortion to minimum. Macro mode is weak and we couldn’t focus as well as other phones having discrete macro mode.
In terms of audio quality, the Nokia E73 gets very loud at the highest level and sounds very crisp. The loudspeaker is not that good which is a bit surprising because there is a grill of three holes on the camera lens’ left. When used in room, we got moderate noise but most people won’t care much about this anyways since E73 is more of a buisness phone.
There is another offering from Symbian called Nuron. Chances are that you haven’t and we don’t blame if you haven’t because was pretty awful. We mean to say that if you are moving to this phone from big wigs like Pre, iPhone, myTouch 3G or G1 then you will be bothered by the S60′s old UI. On the bright side, we still think that it is quite capable and will still stand up to most of your expectations.
The big advantage in E73′s favor is the low price. This phone will cost you just $69.99 which is really low considering it has a five megapixel camera. The built quality too is sturdy. However, if you like to stay up to date, this phone will find it hard to compete with other T-Mobile handsets. There are phones like Samsung Highlight and Comeback which belong to the same price range and we would recommend you to check out these phones before purchasing the Nokia E73.
Nitty Gritty:
Nokia E73 Mode has great value for money and T-Mobile offers this handset at an affordable price too.
