I'm a lot late on posting this as I wasn't expecting to get one of these but I'm glad I did such a cool little device that flexes hard Nokia's incredible engineering. The Nokia N73 was given to me as a Christmas gift and has been used just a little bit on the day and periodically in-between although it has not been on a network so I'm unsure if the cell aspects of this device works but everything else does...
The phone is in excellent quality with only one minor complaints from myself - the power button is far too soft of a touch to activate, pressing it brings up a power option/profile switch but a longer press shuts down the device, the issue is the long vs short press is microseconds apart - far too easy to accidentally turn off.
The camera shutter slide is in shockingly good state, keep in mind it's a movie part and even years later this still snaps back and forth perfectly, I point this out to a lot of people but in general get the look of .. so what but moving parts die, this has held up so well... although I do question if the shell has been swapped out which may explain it's excellent condition.
Bit slow
Using the device is similar but slower in nature to my Nokia N95 8GB - that device is prompt and snappy but the Nokia N73 is a little laggy, little slower but lacks in nothing - the issue perhaps for me here is the software is incredibly similar from device to device - not a bad methodology as we know from iPhones and the Samsung S series that changes on mass can be dangerous but keeping the changes low key leads to customers being familiar and these two devices N73 and N95 8GB are a year apart with the snappy N95 being released only 9 or so months after the N73
The Camera Test
As I mentioned in my iPhone 4s post I'll be using a standard photo from a somewhat specific distance it's not massively scientific but it does give some form of idea of where the tech was at the time.
Perhaps the sad part about this is Nokia clearly knew or had a good scope on what the future of Nokia would be in terms of things like WiFi, Bluetooth and general connectivity as well as the likes of camera tech being a massive part of devices (not to mention video and audio quality) of the future.. Nokia had it all but threw it all away
The camera on this device didn't lock focus, the outside light coming it was a little more gloomy / overcast that the iPhone 4s shot but the inability to focus on the subject within the 5 or so attempts means it's not a good representation of photo quality but even tested with stuff it would lock onto it does have that old slightly in slightly out of focus photo with a ton of haze... downsides of the times.
I ended up connecting this device to my M1 mac mini then using bluetooth browser to get the photos off and it worked quickly and easily - weird given the 16 year difference between the two devices but again Nokia knew the future of phones (in my opinion) and this is why the device to this day still holds up (granted I had to create a new wifi network with G/B support to get it connected to the net)
I learned something
I also learned that this device does have a memory card slot, but it does take an SD card or a Micro SD card, no no it takes a Mini SD card
Which I had no idea existed, although it foes make sense given the tech worlds naming scheme of thing, mini-thing, micro-thing
So that's the N73 a device that will sit proudly next to my N95 8GB and laugh at my sickly Lumia 1020, curious if anyone still uses one of these day to day or what fond or otherwise memories you have of this or other devices.