Last weekend I told you that Nokia invited me to a beach party right here in Southern California to promote the Nokia E73 Mode. Needless to say we had a blast, did everything from kayaking, volleyball game, jet skis, and plenty of booze! Check out some of photos from the day at the E73 Mode Party Flickr Group if you’re interested. We left the party with a Nokia E73 Mode in our hands to trial for a few weeks. Nokia was even nice enough to put a pre-paid T-Mobile sim card inside so we can get some real use out of it. This was huge for me since I’m an AT&T user. So far I’m impressed with the Nokia E73 Mode, although I have a few problems with the software that I’d like to get figured out. I’ll save that for another article. For now check out my thoughts on the Nokia E73 Mode.

Standout Specs:

5mp camera with bright LED flash.
Qwerty mono-block design.
1500mah battery.
Email, Maps, Office Suite, Adobe PDF Manager.
Symbian S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 2.
128mb RAM (enough for decent multitasking).

Hardware

The hardware of the Nokia E73 Mode is probably it’s best feature. This thing is built like a rock. At least it feels that way in your hand. Metal surrounds the front of the phone, sides are made of a hard matte plastic – I mean hard, and the back battery cover is metal. Metal even surrounds the camera module giving it good protection so that the camera lens does not touch the surface that it is sitting on. The volume buttons on the side seems like they’re made out of metal, but it could just be hard plastic painted chrome.

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The four shortcut buttons on the are one with the left/right softkeys and call/end buttons. So in reality it’s only two buttons. I didn’t think I’d like this at first but you get used to it, plus it looks damn sexy. I like this design better than the E72 – and I’m not sure why. Looking at the E72 shortcut buttons you’d think it makes more sense but in the month I had the E72 in hands I just didn’t feel comfortable with it.

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The call quality is what you’d expect from a Nokia – nearly perfect. People can hear me just fine and I can hear them clear as day. The speakerphone is not as loud as I’d like it, it’s pretty much the same as the E71 and E72. Music quality is great and the 3.5mm audio port is a tight fit, no wobbles.

The qwerty keypad of the E73 is another plus. The buttons have a great feel to them and I love the layout. I wish the spacebar was a little bigger, but I can deal. It’s great that you can turn on the flashlight by holding the spacebar and toggle bluetooth by holding the SYM key.

Software

Overall the software is good if you’re not expecting a lot of glitz and glamour. Symbian S60 3rd edition Feature Pack 2 is what we’re working with here and is a proven operating system in the non-touchscreen market. I don’t want to go into much detail about the operating system since you can already find reviews of it all over the web. It’s exactly what you’d see in the Nokia E72 besides a few preinstalled apps.

Speaking of preinstalled apps, T-Mobile really kept their hands off the software – something you don’t see too often as Timi pointed out in his Samsung Vibrant review just the other day. There is barely any T-Mobile branding within the software. At the top left you’ll notice the pink T-Mobile dot, just to the right of the reception bars. I really don’t mind that at all but I’m sure some of you will find a way to remove it with a hack or custom E73 firmware. The TeleNav application is present, but unnecessary since the most updated version of Ovi Maps is also preinstalled – complete with free voice navigation and all the extras you would get in any unlocked Nokia smartphone.

Modes. Modes. Modes! The main selling points are it is business centric but can also cater to your personal life, hence the term “Mode”. The switch mode feature is something we’ve seen on Eseries devices since the Nokia E71, but probably new to E73 users who have never owned an Eseries device. You basically have two customizable homescreens that you can switch between. Nothing groundbreaking but very handy for business users.

The last aspect of the Nokia E73 I’ll talk about is the stability and multitasking. Before I upgraded to the latest firmware the phone restarted itself a few times when trying to connect to a random hotspot and also when browsing the web with Maps running in the background. Just a few days ago Mark from The Nokia Blog informed us of a firmware update for the Nokia E73 so I went ahead and installed it. Since then I’ve had no problems at all – this thing is just as stable as my Nokia E71. I’ve had 7-8 applications running without any crashes or slowdowns. Not bad for a phone that only has 43mb of RAM at startup and still early firmware. I hope that Nokia can bring that up to at least 55mb in future updates just to have some peace of mind. The amount of free RAM and stability proves how mature and efficient Symbian S60 3rd edition Feature Pack 2 really is. The Nokia N97 cannot handle 5 applications on 43mb of RAM without something crashing in the background.

Conclusion

I would highly recommend the Nokia E73 Mode to anyone looking for a compact qwerty smartphone and are a customer of T-Mobile USA. It can do anything one of those giant screened touch phones can do in a small and reliable fashion. I haven’t even talked about the photo and video quality – but I can assure you I’ll show some samples in a follow up article.

You can get the Nokia E73 Mode at T-Mobile.com or one of it’s retail stores. And if you’re really savvy you’ll head over to Amazon where you can get the Mode for a penny. That’s right – a penny when you sign up with a new contract.

Check out our high-res Nokia E73 Photo Gallery for some great close-up shots.

Leave any questions or comments below. If there is a topic you’d like me to cover I will talk about it in my next E73 article.