Unlocked Nokia N73 Review
The Nokia N73 is one of the Finnish manufacturer’s most popular and best selling phones. Billed as a “multimedia computer”, the Nokia N73 for sale ruled the roost when it came to feature-packed smartphones. Already a great value when it was released in the third quarter of 2006, a discounted Nokia N73 unit, today, should not be hard to find and is a really great buy.
The phone measures 110x49x19 mm, which at the time was very compact for a smartphone running the Symbian OS. It was also fairly lightweight at 116 g. The N73 won’t win any design awards as Nokia chose a conservative candy bar form factor. What made the N73 for sale really stand out, apart from the excellent feature set, was its high quality display. Measuring 2.4” and running at a resolution of 240x320 pixels with support for up to 262k colors, the screen was the best in its class. Brightness levels were top notch and readable under sunlight. It also features an ambient light sensor that adjusts brightness automatically.
Build quality is excellent as usual from a Nokia NSeries. Apart from a slightly loose sliding camera cover and the miniSD card slot cover (which felt a bit flimsy), everything else about the phone looks and feels solid and built to last.
The main selling point of the unlocked Nokia N73 for sale is its camera. At 3.2MP with Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus and LED flash, the N73’s camera was one of the best when it was released. Its only competition at the time was Sony Ericsson’s dedicated camera phones which lacked the smartphone features of the N73. Today, even with 5 megapixel camera phones available, the N73 proves that it is still quite capable of taking excellent pictures. Coupled with a great display, photos and videos just pop with great detail, color and sharpness. The phone’s included software for managing and tweaking settings is good as well.
The Nokia N73’s audio player also performed well. It can playback MP3, AAC, eAAC, eAAC+ and WMA files. Visual FM Radio functionality is also a nice touch. Sound output through the dual stereo speakers was good, faltering slightly at higher volumes. To truly appreciate stereo sound, a quality headset should be used. A decent one is provided by Nokia in the package. But if you want to use your Shure earphones, you will have to fork over more money for an adapter as the N73 comes with Nokia’s proprietary Pop-Port.
For storage, the N73 features 42MB of internal memory as well as a port for hot swappable miniSD cards. Syncing of your files should be a quick affair thanks to Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR and USB 2.0.
Other notable features include a good suite of PIM applications, which can be synced with Microsoft Outlook on your PC, Office document viewers, an email client and a good web browser. Sadly, the Webkit-based browser cannot be used in landscape mode which would have put the excellent screen to even better use. Call quality and signal reception is typical Nokia. Reception is strong and voice calls were clear on both ends with excellent volume levels.
Battery life was a surprise considering all the power consuming features the phone has. The battery lasted about 3 days with average to heavy usage.
The discounted Nokia N73 for sale truly deserves being regarded as one of, if not the best phones in its time. It has since been succeeded by the N82 and other better NSeries smartphones. But, due to its age, heavily discounted Nokia N73 units can be found everywhere making for an excellent value smartphone.
