Anyone know much about the N73?

spartan ( 117 )

New member
After my traumatising experience trying to change from a 6230 to a K750i, I have sworn allegiance to Nokia.

I have been alerted to the availability of the N73, and at first glance it's an incredibly nice looking phone, and the price I can get it for is most affordable.

However, I find Nokia's home page very uninformative regarding the Symbian OS phones, so could I possibly ask you chaps for some enlightenment?

I need:
Am I correct in understanding the Symbian OS based phones allow the user to define how much storage is allocated to holding SMS messages? I would like to be able to store thousands, would the N73 allow that?Extended battery life - my 6230 struggles to live for more than about 2 days maximum.A good quality media player. I admit one of the vast improvements of the K750i over my 6230 was the sound quality on the audio - I'd want more of the same in this respect.Ability to upgrade firmware online, rather than paying some professional to do it for you.GPRS web access.A good camera.The ability to restore text (etc) backups from earlier phones via Nokia PC Suite.Possible ability to password protect particular folders, such as text messages etc - so that no one else could snoop on private content.
How many of these would the N73 fulfil?

If anyone can help, I'd really appreciate them addressing each point, if possible.

Thanks.
 
You have come to the right place my friend. The answers:

1) I don't think you can allocate the number of msgs that can be stored, although the number of msgs that can be stored is, for all practical purposes, unlimited. You can change the location of the stored msgs to the memory card, to save space on the phone memory.

2) I'm not sure how long the battery on the N73 lasts, but the one on my E61 keeps up for up to 3 days with the use of WIFI, music player and calls.

3) I think the music player on my E61 is really good, and works superbly with the HS20 headset. However, IMHO the quality of sound depends heavily on the quality of the earphones.

4) You can upgrade the firmware online via your own PC.

5) The Web browser on the current generation Series 60 range is supposed to be the best on any mobile device.

6) I can't really comment on the camera but the camera on my N80, which is a lower end camera than the N73, is pretty good.

7) If you store msgs on your memory card, you don't need to restore msgs from the PC Suite for obvious reason. Even if you do choose to store msgs on the phone, using the PC Suite to restore information and data, msgs and email included is a piece of cake.

8) I don't think password protecting is possible, however, if a third party application for this exists, then you are in luck.

Good Luck.
 
Read these reviews. They answer several of your questions, in addition to the other responses.

Review #1

Review #2

And...there is a 3rd party app to lock/password protect applications, such as the photo viewer, music player, etc.

HTH.
 
ok i got one for myself and goin down the list...

*well you could store text messages to your memory card. its as easy as changing an option in the message settings. and as for how many messages you can hold, well its however much memory you have, either on your memory card or your phone's on-board memory.

*i use my phone constantly throughout the day, connected to t-zones most of the day and i need to recharge my battery every day. usually send a few hundred messages or so an about 20 megs of packet data both sent and recieved... (work is very boring)...

*the included media player that comes with the standard n73 is decent but the n73 ME has a visualizer or so i've heard

*with the nokia software updater, you can download newer firmware and update your phone. (jus dont touch your computer or your phone when you do!)

*yes the n73 does have web access, allong with the new s60 v3 browser

*3.2 megapixel camera, the next one up is the n95 with a 5mp camera

*that 1 im not too sure of...never did try to do that...

*there are additional 3rd party programs that would restrict access to certain menus w/ a password protection

if you dont mind me askin...whats the need to store thousands of text messages anyways? there are sms diary programs thats out that allow you to store them in 1 txt file but it seems like you wanna store the actual message and what not.

well anyways im sure a bunch of the other n73 ppl will gladly put their opnion on this subject too but this is jus my 2 cents XD
 
Seeing 5 replies to the thread already supports your claim sir



That's absolutely fine. Just as long as I don't get plagued by 'message memory almost full' every 10 seconds. Quite why earlier Nokias didn't allow the memory card to be used for text storage is beyond me.



Hmmm, so we're kinda both in the dark on this one.



Quite true.



Excellent.



Again, good stuff.



3.2MP I guess suggests the N73 has a pretty dang good camera.



You've slightly misread me. I have several messages on my current 6230, and I have no desire to lose them. Hence why I wish to transfer them into the N73 - and PC Suite would be how I'd do it. This is what I meant by earlier phones.



So I hear. How does this work?



Trust me, I gratefully receive your wish of this, because I've historically found the 'Great Mobile Phone Hunt' to be a notoriously stressful endeavour.
 
Great links, thanks for the info.

btw, when you say 3rd party app, I presume it would be downloaded from the PC and installed onto the phone? Can you shed any further light on this?
 
Yes indeed. I'm really rather pleased by this.



Whoa, you use it even more than I do. I guess 2 or 3 days is as much as I'm gonna get.



Just as long as the basic sound quality is good. Bear in mind me hearing the K750i's quality compared to the 6230 was night and day. So I'm a bit behind the times.



*steps away from PC*



More good news.



Amen.



I'm pretty much in the dark about this one too.



Good to hear - although I'm not wholly clear on how it works.



That's exactly it. I wish to hold onto the actual message. And let's just say I send and receive a LOT. And constantly find myself having to clear the inbox up. I'm sick of doing it. I'd rather just have vast amounts of space.



Very much appreciated bud.
 
If you want to know if its possible to transfer texts msgs from a 6230 to a Series 60 phone, I could let you know by the end of the week.

My flatmate is getting an N80, which coincidentally, he is upgrading from a 6230.
 
The 3rd party app that can lock individual applications is called Advanced Device Locks. I haven't tried it yet, but probably will at some point.

Loading apps and themes and music and ringtones and movies and pictures and all that other stuff is what the Symbian OS is all about. Most can be loaded on the phone either via the web interface, POP port cable, Bluetooth, etc. Just depends...

HTH.
 
I just did a little search. Apparently there's a program from Nokia called Lifeblog, which does EXACTLY this. Your flatmate will need it too. Its only downside is it apparently loses the name of the sender, and restores it under the number of the sender only.

So rock and roll
 
I'll answer the ones that havn't been clearly answered.

Battery Life - I got it to 3.5 days without much music playing (2 hours of music in 3.5 ays?). I got it to 2 (or more like 1.8~1.9) days with a lot of music playback (everytime I walk out of the house), gaming (everytime I get bored), and so on.

Music Quality is excellent, with decent earphones, that is. As for loudspeaker, I find it crackling if u set it at like 80% the max volume, which is REALLY LOUD (i quickly closed my ears). You'll surely never want to put it that loud, afraid that the speaker will crack. The N-Gage loudspeaker is a lot smoother though.

Camera is excellent. The only bad thing about camera is that at night, or in dark places, the photo taken is a bit purple'ish most of the time, but everything else is great. People even say the photos taken by N73 is better than N93. (I'd agree, too much noise in the photos taken in N93 if you look at the photo on PC.)

Message Importing cannot be done from a non-Symbian v3 to N73 (Symbian V3), AFAIK. I just copied the mesages from my SymbinV1 (N-Gage) phone and saved it in my computer, but couldn't import it to N73.

Oh, this has been stated already, but I want to stress how much you can store sms, even only with your phone mem. Your phone mem has the memory capacity of 40MB, those old nokia phones (not sure about 6230) has only 1-2MB, or even less. Now imagine a .txt file with like 150 characters in it. That's about... 2-3kb? Now, you can store whopping of these messages in your 40MB phone. (assuming that you don't fill the interal memory with a lot of apps/games/photos/whoknows)
 
Yeah, it does look like battery life is something all mobile phones really have to work on. I guess I'm not gonna get a vast improvement over my 6230.



I'll just be using the supplied headset. It was more than adequate for sound quality on the K750i.



I'm slightly unsure about this. The fellow above kindly supplied a link comparing photo quality between the N73 and one or two others, and the Samsung was noticeably better. Don't get me wrong, I think the N73's camera will be more than useful for me, but I'm just not sure that it's absolutely outstanding.



As mentioned before, I did a quick search, and found this thread on another forum:

Here

I suspect N-Gage is somehow different. Or you didn't try LifeBlog.



I've been thinking about this...

(forgive the crudeness of the following, but the point should be clear enough)

Ok, I tested out a Sammie clamshell, and one of the things it does is to inform you the actual byte size of each text; most often it was 200bytes, occasionally 100.

So let's take that figure (100) and put it into a kilobyte (1000byes) = 10 texts. There are 1000 k in a megabyte, so that's 100 texts per meg. 40MB? That is 4000 messages.

It's ample, but by no means a gargantuan amount. Long way from it really.
 
I think your conversion is incorrect. . .

1 MB = 1000 KB = 1,000,000 Bytes
40 MB = 40,000 KB = 40,000,000 Bytes
40,000,000/100 = 400,000 Text Messages.

That sounds a bit more realistic.

I've used Lifeblog before, but I had to stop because it start to became a beast on my computer after only a few months of use. If you plan on transferring pictures and video outside of Lifeblog and into your own folders on your PC (as I do) then you will end up with two locations when you sync with Lifeblog because it syncs with ALL of these things. I'm fairly sure there's a way to have it only sync texts, but I'm not 100% clear on this. The big problem with syncing all your pictures and video with Lifeblog is that the program will become the only place to view and organize your stuff. Lifeblog places all of your pictures into its own folders in the Lifeblog program folder, and that's where they must stay if you want them to come up in the right place the next time you open Lifeblog.

The one point that nobody has really included in describing the N73 is the 3rd party application support. This is the one feature that separates Symbian devices from all the rest of phones out there. If your phone doesn't do something you'd like it to, chances are there was an application written to make it happen. my-symbian.com currently has 216 applications for s60 3rd Edition, 1747 applications for 2nd Edition (the N73 is 3rd Edition), and there are even more available outside of that website. Sure there are other OS's that have 3rd party support, but not like Symbian. These devices are the easiest and by far the best phones to use on the market with some of the greatest functionality I've ever seen. Once you buy one, you're not leaving these forums. I'm sure of it.
 
Half a million? That's never enough, I'll be full after the first day



These forums are absolutely excellent.

I just wanted to say I receive the N73 tomorrow purely thanks to the marvellous advice in this thread. Thanks to all who contributed.

(You are all equally to blame if the phone turns out to be rubbish though :P)
 
yup yup same here. i usually get tired of the phone that i have after about 3 months but with my n73 im goin on 4 months and countin with this phone. im always findin new stuff to do with my phone and with everything that i currently have on here its replaced many different "extra" items to carry around ex : ipod, organizer, radio, internet radio, portable dvd player...u name it an this wonderful lil "multimedia computer" will most likely be able to do it for u. well besides fix u a homecooked breakfast
 
The N73 is the 4th phone I've had longer than 6 months. My first was my phone from AT&T, the Moto T720 because I was young and poor. My second was a Nokia 6800 that I carried with me all through senior year of high school. The third was the 6630 a few summers ago and the N73 is my last. Having the N73 for this long is a big deal for me since I changed phones almost 4 times this past summer. I am starting to itch for something new after I've ran into firmware issues that I can't fix (thanks to iunlock.com) and scratches on the corners from dropping it, but I might only replace it with a new one. I should just hold out for an N95, but I'm really anxious.

All that being said, I don't think you'll be disappointed in the least.
 
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