Nokia N73 review

Sandra Vogel

One of the browser's neat features is that if you scroll around quickly within a page a thumbnail of it appears on screen.

We review the Nokia N73 smartphone which brings with it a 3.2 megapixel camera and a Carl Zeiss Optics lens

Nokia’s N73 is the follow up to the popular N70. It is a very capable phone that makes light of all the goodies inside by coming in a pretty plain, ‘candybar’ style casing.

The N73 has a huge front screen measuring 2.4 inches corner to corner, and a smallish number pad. It is relatively light in the hand at 116g, and not oversized for the pocket at 110mm tall, 48mm wide and 19mm thick.

But look closer and you’ll see the front facing camera that caters for video calling using its built in 3G capability. 3G lends itself to fast Web use too, and there is very a capable browser built in.

One of the browser’s neat features is that if you scroll around quickly within a page a thumbnail of it appears on screen. This is really useful for pinpointing which bit of a Web page you want to get to and going there fast.

Another is that you can view browsing history as a series of thumbnail images, making it easy to get a visual cue of what pages you’ve visited look like, which helps you go back and forth easily.

Web pages and other information gets displayed in the superb 320 x 240 pixel screen which also shows itself off nicely when you are using the main camera, another star features of this handset.

This shoots stills at 3.2 megapixels (that’s 2048 x 1536 pixels), and has a Carl Zeiss Optics lens that allows it to autofocus on its subject. It’ll shoot in macro mode as close as 10cm from the subject.

The lens is on the back of the N73 and is protected by a sliding cover. Uncover the lens and the camera software swings into action. The phone’s display rotates into wide screen mode, and you can use the two softmenu keys and the mini joystick to select options while side keys that are on the top edge of the phone zoom, shoot and flip over into the phone’s picture gallery where you can view images as well as send them via Bluetooth, MMS or even upload them to the Web.

There is plenty more including a very good music player and FM radio, a slot for miniSD cards so you can add to the 40MB plus of built in storage, mobile email, calendar, voice recorder, calculator, PDF reader and even viewers for Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel documents. Oh, and it is Quad band.

When you come across a phone which feels good in the hand and packs a great number of features, you know you are onto a winner.