Some two years after the recover, there are still plenty of people who’ll swear up as well as down that the E71 is the excellent phone Nokia has ever constructed — and for good reason. As the platform, S60 was the product of a easier time when a smartphone marketplace was dominated not by touchscreens, but by numeric keypads, and the E71 was arguably the last of a string of bona fide successes which Nokia enjoyed in a platform’s heyday alongside pioneering handsets like the N82 and N95. Thing is, the E71 was dissimilar than those alternative models in a very critical approach: it was elegant. Historically, Nokias have typically adored duty over form as well as saved a highest-quality materials for the Vertu line, but the E71 bucked that trend — it was slim, sexy, chock-full of steel, and winding in all a right places. In actuality, to this day, it stays one of a best-looking, best-feeling smartphones ever made.

Customers (and reviewers) made their love for a E71 transparent, and Nokia sought to recapture the glory with a introduction of a polished, upgraded E72. For Americans, of course, a greatest problem with a E72 was which you couldn’t buy it from a carrier — as well as distinct a E71, it never got most traction as an unlocked squeeze. That’s where the E73 Mode comes into play, the mildly reworked chronicle of a E72 with T-Mobile branding as well as, of march, support for 3G upon T-Mobile’s AWS bands. Put bluntly, yet, this is still only the warmed-over E71 — and in 2010, is there the market for which? Let’s have the look.Nokia E73 Mode review

Having been scarcely the year given we’d used an E71, you felt right at home a first time you wrapped our palm around a E73 — it’s viewable which Nokia put bid into preserving the sorcery that done a E71 such a great piece of hardware. For those of you who haven’t played with an E71, though, you don’t know what that means — so concede us to polish elegant for the bit. The E73 clocks in at only over 10 millimeters thick, though for some reason, it feels even thinner; that’s substantially the result of a little creative curves along possibly side of a behind, a trick identical to the E71’s. The battery cover is the plain piece of steel that looks as well as feels good, yet it has the tendency to blemish as well as oil up very, really simply, so you’ll want to keep the lint-free cloth (or, you know, a shirt sleeve) accessible for when you’re perplexing to keep appearances.

The E73 also shares what competence be the singular most important trait with a E71: rock-solid building a whole. Nokias — even modern devices similar to a N97 as well as N900 — have a bent toward a plastic finish of a spectrum, as well as creaks, squeaks, and wobbles aren’t out of the question (the N95 was particularly scandalous for feeling the small cheap). That might all shift with a N8, though for now, the kind of monocoque bombard in use by a E73 is still a bit of a rarity. It feels absolutely fantastic in the hand, perfectly weighted as well as contoured.

If there was a complaint to be levied opposite a E71’s pattern, it’d have to be the set of keys; the rows were true across rather than being curved upwards like many well-regarded portrait QWERTY handsets (BlackBerrys, for instance), as well as a keys — while well-contoured — didn’t have utterly sufficient “click” to them. The E73 adds the spirit of curve, though a key design as well as feel sojourn a same. We’re not outrageous on portrait QWERTY keyboards in general, admittedly — but since we’d be able to get proficient on a BlackBerry Bold inside of the notation of picking it up, we never stopped regularly creation typos on the E73. It wasn’t catastrophic enough to break the deal, but we do think Nokia could’ve done some teenager changes here that would’ve helped immensely.

Similarly, a navigation keys on top of the set of keys are a little uncanny (albeit for different reasons). This is actually an area where a Mode has taken a small step backward from a E71, since the shortcut keys for Home, Calendar, Address Book, as well as Mail are no longer delineated. Instead, they share the same piece of cosmetic as the soft keys and the Send / End buttons, giving the functions far reduction positive feel than we’d similar to — generally given they’re mushy, to foot. The center is dominated by a d-pad, a four-way rocking ring with an visual desk pad in the middle. It seems Nokia got a little too desirous here with the spec piece; they should’ve picked a rocker or an visual desk pad, not both, since we found the desk pad worried to “swipe” when it’s surrounded by a lifted ring. It’s not a huge complaint — you just turned off a visual desk pad and used the ring a same way you would upon an E71 — though we would’ve been excellent with a properly-designed visual pad alone, too.

The shade is a landscape QVGA unit, the vestige of days gone by — but that’s only the reflection of the underlying handling system as much as anything else. Using a E73 is a serious time warp, yet it does at slightest conduct to use S60 3.2, the strike up from a Eseries-customized build of 3.1 used on the E71. In practice, which means you’ll suffer a little quaint shade transitions (which look flattering horrible compared to the transitions upon any current Android device or iPhone), the time and third soft pass on most screens, the brand-new gallery app, and alternative refinements sprinkled throughout. The browser is standard S60 transport, which is to say utterly good — by 2007 standards, anyway — employing a WebKit rendering engine along with Flash Lite 3.0 await. Sure sufficient, Engadget’s full site, the gold customary for this sort of test, rendered only fine — though it was painfully delayed to finish and essentially one after another to intermittently freeze up while scrolling even after loading had finished (probably Flash’s fault, if we had to theory. Indeed, the E73’s processor, just like a height itself, is straight out of yesteryear.

On a splendid side, T-Mobile has done a marvelous job of staying hands-off with the E73’s program build, leaving it nearly bone stock (compare that to the disturbance of AT&T’s butchered E71x, for example. Don’t get us wrong, there’s quite the bit of software in ROM, but it’s actually all things you probably would’ve downloaded anyhow, hold it or not — no, seriously. Stuff similar to Google Mobile, YouTube, Adobe Reader, QuickOffice, Psiloc’s Wireless Presenter, as well as Ovi Maps with free turn-by-turn nav is all bundled, as well as about a only two things you’ll find with the whiff of T-Mobile change have been TeleNav and entrance to visual voicemail. Good stuff.

Nokia isn’t unequivocally personification up a E73’s front-facing camera, and it turns out there’s the great reason for that. Strangely, this is a single place where T-Mobile’s ROM customization actually didn’t go distant sufficient, since the E73 lets you try to place video calls as though you were connected to a network that supports them (T-Mobile’s network — only like AT&T’s — does not). You do this just as you would on any alternative complicated S60 phone, so it’s viewable that someone only forgot to take out this menu object; clicking on it tries to have the call, followed by an error message a integrate seconds later. Not the big deal, though it’s a small sloppy. What bothers us some-more is which there’s no good way to video call on a phone over Skype or a similar use; Fring is the usually viable option which we’re aware of, though it’s ungainly to make use of as well as (in the case, anyhow extremely cart. We’d recommend adhering with voice until Fring gets better — way, approach improved — or an additional player like Qik gets into a diversion.

Speaking of a camera, the E73’s primary shooter — a 5 megapixel unit with LED flash — wasn’t half bad, generally deliberation that the phone is distant from the multimedia-centric device. We’d love to have had the dedicated two-position camera key, though in lieu of which, we found autofocus and shutter lag to be pretty minimal. Picture peculiarity was pretty plain, with little noise as well as the JPEG application rate high sufficient to keep visible exaggeration to the minimum. Macro mode was the bit weak — you couldn’t focus scarcely as close as we can upon most complicated handsets with dedicated macro modes — though it still gave us an advantage for close-up shots over a standard environment.

As audio peculiarity goes, a Mode’s earpiece was crisp as well as really loud during the maximum environment; a loudspeaker less so, which astounded us deliberation a vast three-hole grill to a left of a camera lens. It’s usable in the room with small to moderate noise, though not long ago, we’ve noticed the trend toward very shrill speakerphones upon these devices that can nearly hold their own opposite traditional table phones — and unnecessary to contend, the E73 doesn’t fall into that category. That might not be the big understanding for most potential buyers, though deliberation a Eseries’ traditionally business-heavy leanings, it’s some-more of the care than it’d be otherwise.

Wrap-up
Unlike T-Mobile’s other new Symbian charity — a forgettable Nuron — we’re prone to think which a E73 has warranted the keep, and there are people out there for whom this phone legitimately creates sense. Don’t get us wrong, anyone entrance from the G1, myTouch 3G, iPhone, Pre, or a like is going to be uneasy by S60’s elderly, sleepy feel, though at the finish of a day, this is still the really capable, versatile height which can do flattering much anything you need it to — as long as you know how to awaken it, you can figure out what software to download, and you’ve got enough calm to let that geriatric silicon slave along.

What in conclusion makes a Mode a intensity winner, though, is a cost — we’re talking about $69.99 for the legitimate 5 megapixel smartphone which looks (and feels) like it’s been wrought from the singular ingot of steel. S60’s still the tough sell against probably any other smartphone height in T-Mobile’s lineup currently, certain, though when you consider that throwaway dumbphones similar to the Samsung Comeback and Highlight are offered in a same price range, it becomes the more engaging proposition. Indeed, Nokia has made no secret of a actuality that it’s seeking to Symbian to assistance pull smartphone tech deeper into the low end of the market over a next several years — as well as if which means gorgeous $70 hardware, that’s just fine by us.