N73 Impressions

Question

A year ago I posted comments here on the N70. Most of what I didn’t like has been corrected in the N73. So maybe the Nokia engineers really do read these postings. Here are my impressions of the N73.
The N73 form factor is a little longer than the N70’s, but it’s slimmer and much lighter—about as handy a phone as you could hope for, given the generous size of the screen. There’s a volume control on the side now, making it much more convenient to adjust the volume, and big improvements to the camera cover: It doesn’t slide open by itself anymore and it’s less bulky. There’s also a dedicated camera capture key, which is handy, and another button that takes you right to your most recently shot photo, which I keep pressing accidentally. The wrist strap is in a better location, at the bottom of the camera, beside the earphone attachment, so you can put the phone in a pocket without resting it on the earphone plug and have access to the strap.
Two complaints about the new configuration: (1) The memory card cover is alarmingly flimsy and there’s nothing to grip when you want to open it. It has to be pried off by sliding a sharp blade or similar under one end. Moreover, it opens from one end only and there’s no marking on the phone to indicate which. (2) The jog stick is tiny and VERY hard to manoeuvre accurately. I have small fingers but am forever ‘selecting’ when I want to be moving the focus.
The earphones are also significantly improved over those of the N70. The loss of the two little anti-tangle rings is small price to pay for much better fitting earpieces and a volume control. Sound through the earphones is excellent.
The screen is large, bright and displays images handsomely. The principle camera takes amazingly good photos, and the repositioning of the image to horizontal when you turn the camera is nice. A BIG improvement over the N70 is the way the N73’s music player behaves when interrupted. If you pause it, it remembers the track you last played. Even if you exit temporarily from the player, it reopens on the last played track. If you pause the player before going to another function, an icon appears on the standby screen which takes you right back to the track you were on. If, on the other hand, the player isn’t paused but rather interrupted by an incoming or outgoing phone call, when you hang up, it resumes right where it left off. Extremely civilized. The player requires a little more navigation than on the N70—play/pause, forward and back are now controlled from separate icons. But since each icon only does one thing, once you get to the one you want, it works as expected: No more skipping back a track when you were just trying to rewind the current one.
There’s an irritating (new, I think) tic that afflicts the search for a contact: Once you’ve typed in enough of the name so that the contact you want appears in the list, and you're cursoring down toward it, it’s very easy to ‘select’ the wrong name, because of the difficulty of manoeuvring the joy stick. Once you’ve backed out of the wrong contact, the name you were seeking has disappeared from the search list, and you have to start the search process again.
The phone does suffer from some other quirks which have been much noted on this site: Whenever you turn it on, you get a message to the effect that you have voice mail (when you don’t). Also, each time you turn the phone off, it seems to lose the ability to manage the files on the memory card (mine is 1 GB). Connecting it to your computer as a mass storage device and then running a disk check with error correction gets the card going again, but it’s a nuisance. Easier is to avoid turning the phone off. Another apparent defect: Sometimes, for no clear reason, the battery runs flat very fast—in less than a day with little or no use. I’ve been caught out more than once.
The manual is not good. There is no labelled diagram of the phone, and no instructions either for removing the battery cover or the memory card cover. Icons that appear on the screen are not explained in the manual.
PC Suite’s Music Transfer (ver. 6.81.13) utility is improved over the previous. It loads the phone contents much faster. It also lists files on the computer faster. It’s easier to select a group of files for copying or to include in a track list. The interface is pretty lacklustre, though, and it crashes too frequently.
On balance, the N73 is a big improvement over the N70. I like it despite its quirks, and If Nokia can work those out, it will be a standout phone.
Pamela

Answer 1

Well, you're partly right. My Get Started booklet does describe how to remove the battery cover and it does have a diagram of the phone's working parts. It also has a section entitled 'insert your memory card', but this says nothing about HOW to insert it--that is, how to open the slot cover, which is by no means obvious.
As for icon explanations, there's a list of 'Essential indicators', starting p. 11 of my manual but, as the heading implies, it doesn't include all icons. The only example of an omission I can think of at the moment is the icon that appears, near the top of the standby screen, when volume is turned all the way down. Of course, if you're watching the screen so that you see the icon appear while you're deliberately lowering the volume, you can figure out what it means. But if you simply come upon it, you might not have a clue. Mysterious icons sometimes appear in my list of tracks. I have searched for their meaning in vain.