Mobiles Reviews

In a nutshell: A high-spec 3G smartphone with a fantastic camera, music player, FM radio, video calling and loads of memory. Compact and lightweight for a Symbian phone, the N73 brings smartphone technology into the mainstream. Early versions of the firmware were problematic, but the latest phones seem to be much more reliable.

The Nokia N73 updates the Nokia N73 3G SmartPhone. The N73 is a lot thinner than the N70 and weighs less as well, making it one of the lightest smartphones. It has a conventional boxy design with a regular keypad very similar to the N70. The keys are a little too small for large fingers to use easily and the joystick can be fiddly too. The display is very large with an amazing 240 x 320 pixel resolution and 262,000 colours. Its one of the best displays on any smartphone.

As well as upgrading the display, Nokia have upgraded the camera in a big way. The N73 sports a 3.2 megapixel camera using the same Carl Zeiss optics and CMOS sensor that made the N70 a powerful imaging device. The camera has a built-in flash, 20x digital zoom, macro mode, plenty of optional settings and a photo editor. It doesn’t perform quite as well as the best camera phones from Sony Ericsson, but it significantly outperforms its predecessor and is a very good camera. Video recording is at CIF resolution with a framerate of 15 frames per second. Usefully video can be recorded in either 3GP or MPEG4 formats. A video editor application is included. There’s a second inward-facing VGA camera for making video calls.

The N73 is also a great music device. It has a music player that supports a wide range of formats including MP3, WMA and AAC, and also an FM radio with Visual Radio functionality to display information about the artist and track playing. The music player supports playlists and an equalizer lets you adjust sound quality. Sound is through dual stereo speakers or using the stereo headset supplied.

The internal memory has been expanded to 42 Mbytes and there’s support for a hot-swapable miniSD card. This will provide bags of room for storing music tracks and videos, making full use of the possibility to record videos of up to 90 minutes in length. Connectivity is via Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0 and infrared. Battery life is very good for a 3G phone.

The latest versions of the firmware do seem to be fixing the reliability problems however, and Nokia are very good at making new firmware releases available. The N73 is such a capable phone that you might want to take a risk, particularly as there are now such good offers available on new contracts.