Review: Nokia N72

Nokia claims their N series to be mini computers. Rather, mini multimedia computers. You can do pretty much everything with an N-series device that you do with an ordinary computer.

When I got this phone last month, I thought I would be needing my “ordinary” computer for a minimal number of tasks as this new mobile computer would cater most of my computing needs.

The reality turned out to be quite different.

Let’s list down common tasks that you do on a computer (or a multimedia computer).

Send and receive email
Browse the web
Send and receive instant messages
Listen to music
Watch movies

Now let’s see how comfortable it was to perform each of those tasks on my Nokia N72.

Nokia N72 has a POP3 and IMAP client. It takes minutes to setup. However, the interface leaves a lot to be desired. Maybe this has to do with the limited screen size, which doesn’t let all the information to be displayed, such as email date and time, and only shows sender and subject. Also, because of narrow screen, long email body takes a lot of scrolling to read.

If you use gmail then you can download gmail client and use that to send and receive emails through gmail. It has a better interface and makes best use of available space. But that’s the feature of gmail, not N72. I suggest you migrate to gmail, not only because it has excellent mobile features, but also because gmails makes it extremely productive to use email.

In summary, it gets a little getting used to, but it is possible to completely migrate to N72 to send and receive emails, as long as you are not dealing with huge attachments. This really comes in handy when you are travelling and can’t check your mail using the traditional methods.

Let’s see how’s the web browsing experience on Nokia N72.

There are quite a few web browsers that come with the phone, including opera. I personaly think web browsing on mobile phones has a long way to go. After being addicted to content-rich websites, full of graphics and animations and scripts and ajax and whatnot, it’s doesn’t give me any pleasure to browse minimized versions of normal web pages. Come on, be serious, how could someone enjoy browsing without graphics and all? It’s just not worth it. Add that to narrow screen and it feels like the webpage is stuck in a small box with no space for all the text. I’ll use web browsing only when it’s really necessary, when I don’t have my fully functional computer around me.

I haven’t really tried instant messaging on N72. But there are clients for various instant messaging platforms available for this phone. I am sure they would be pretty usable and prove to be a great aid in staying in touch with your friends.

As far as music is concerned, I think this phone rocks! It supports mp3 and organizes the tracks by artists and albums. The sound quality with headphones is also not bad. The speakers, however, could have been better. The phone also has a radio, but it doesn’t work without headphones attached to it, which is a bummer because I don’t carry headphones with me all the time, and if I want to listen to radio and don’t have headphones, I am stuck.

I don’t think the phone even qualifies to watch movies, as we do on computers, so I won’t even touch it. But you can record clips using its camera. Then you can process those videos, add a background music, and do funky stuff to make a nice video. Not bad for budding filmmakers.

Another feature of this phone is 2 megapixel camera. It takes decent pictures. It has flash so you can use it under low light conditions. Not the best camera phone in the world, but it will do the job most of the times.

Besides that, the there are tons of third party applications available for the phone that you can download and use.

I was a bit disappointed by the user interface of the phone. It takes a bunch of clicks to do some of the most common things, like replying to a text message. It takes at least 3 clicks of a button to reach reply sms screen. There’s got to be a shortcut but I haven’t found it yet.

After all said and done, the thing that annoys me the most about this phone is its speed. It’s too damn slow. I don’t know if all smart phones are like that, but I am not at all satisfied with its speed. This combined with an unfriendly user interface sometimes makes the phone a pain to use. Specially when you want to do something really quick, the phone just doesn’t cooperate. That’s when you want to throw the phone out of the window.

So, did I end up using the phone more and the computer less? Not really. I use the phone only when computer is not accessible to me. But it doesn’t eliminate the need to use computer. Mobile phones still have to go to a long way before they can completely replace laptop and desktop computers. Are we there yet? Not even close! When will we get there? In a few years… it’s only a matter of time. But until then I will continue to use my computer for most internet related tasks. For music I might swtich to the phone completely but I would still need the compter to transfer music. So they really complement each other, not compete.