I enjoy reviews like this. Personally I’m a little bit jaded since I’ve played with WinMo, Palm, S40 and S60. A fresh perspective is sometimes needed. This guy, Steven Wittens, lays down the foundation of his piece by describing his mobile phone history:
Two months ago I got a Nokia N73 hand-me-down from Roland
thanks to Nokia’s Blogger Relations Program. It’s a ‘smart phone’ with
a large 320×240 screen, a 3 megapixel camera and more. Before this, I’d
been using an old Nokia 3310 brick (monochrome screen) so this was
quite a step up. Still, I wasn’t particularly unhappy with my old phone
because all I really needed was voice calls and SMS. So I was curious
myself to see if I’d actually use all the bells and whistles.
Let us see what Nokia can learn from him:
I did try editing contacts on the phone itself, and it was way too complicated.
There is a big annoyance here: it takes 5-7 seconds to open the camera application. This is way too long and makes it impossible to snap spontaneous pictures. Also, in spite of all the technical wizardry, pictures in low-light conditions and at night look very bad and washed out. The pictures it takes are also compressed too much. There’s a 1GB memory card in mine, so I really wish I could save images to (near-)lossless JPEG.
The phone’s music player is simply horrible. The UI makes no use of the N73’s buttons: I’d expect to be able to fast forward or backward by holding the stick left/right, and clicking it left/right to go to another song. Instead, you have to press up/down to reach the right on-screen button and then press the stick to push it.
Even more annoying is that leaving the music player stops all playback. If you wish to use the N73 like a real MP3 player, you have to go into a context-menu, scroll down and select "Play in background", then lock the keypad from the main screen every single time. The current behaviour only makes sense if you wish to listen to random audio clips at random moments, which I really don’t see myself doing.
To top it all off, there’s the fact that you can only use the official Nokia headphones with the N73, because they have a proprietary connector. I already have headphones for my laptop and I don’t want to carry another set around.
The phone’s own calendar input is, again, clunky and cumbersome to use.
For playing video, the phone uses RealPlayer. Now, I realize this might sound a bit irrational, but I for one don’t want anything to do with Real. They have screwed over their users for years on end producing ridiculously crappy players bundled with some of the most insidious spyware and adware seen. But even disregarding that, RealPlayer is a horrible choice as it doesn’t play any of the most popular video formats, like DivX or QuickTime. With open-source players like VLC being able to play every format under the sun, there is really no excuse for this.
Having used this phone, I can clearly see why traditional cellphone makers should fear Apple’s iPhone. I’ve consistenty avoided using the phone’s built-in tools like address book and calendar editing, because doing it on my Mac is orders of magnitude easier and faster. From what I’ve seen, the iPhone changes that. I really wish the iPhone will bring a fresh wave of usability improvements for mobile devices. But, if usability was all that mattered, we wouldn’t be seeing so many Windows installs out there either …
I’m not going to penilize him for saying a phone, that isn’t out yet, is better than one that has been on the market for 8 months simply because the feedback he has given is absolutely brilliant. What I’ve been ranting on about for almost 3 months now he captures in this brief, but concise review. I didn’t even copy and paste all of it since there is so much more to go! I highly recommend Nokia take this critique to heart. It really says a lot about how a brand new smart phone user takes on to a device.
Source, and complete (must read) N73 review: Acko.net
Thank you Steven!