I am using this set since last 5 months. It is an interesting one but I am bit unfortunate. Within 5 months the joystick broke. Had to go to the service centre at Marathahalli, Bangalore and the place looked like a fish market. It took about a week to get the joystick replaced. Service is too bad lately.
The phones that I have used till date are: Nokia 5110 > Nokia 3310 > Sony Ericsson T310 > Motorola E398 > Nokia 6630 > Nokia 6630 again since the previous one died! > Nokia N73 ME.
Best experience was Motorola E398. I had to take it for repair since I soaked it in rain. But still the service people obliged and repaired the keyboard with usual charges even after warranty period. When my Nokia 6630 stopped working I took it to Koramangla, Banglaore Nokia Care and they found some microscopic moisture in the set which came from nowhere on a sunny day! and the set was declared ‘not repairable’. This happened within 3 months of purchase! I had to buy a new set.
N73 ME is a music phone but lacks few essentials. One of them is A2DP support. This has pissed me off royally! I can’t use a stereo bluetooth headset with this phone and still have to live with the comment that this is a music phone. Utterly stupid. Nokia does not mention anywhere that this support in not there! For a common customer, it is impossible to make out what is lacking in the device until they actually use it. To top this my phone has become dead slow since I have a few applications installed in it. (Even loading few themes makes it slow!)
There are plenty of better devices than this one at a much cheaper price. Well you can go for this set if you are blind for Nokia and have an indecent amount of cash to throw away. Remember.. what goes up must come down. It’s Nokia’s turn. They soar too high and lost the ladder. Nokia phones are expensive and have least features and to add this they are turning out to be cheap in quality. I burnt my fingers by shelling out Rupees 23, 000/- for this stupid phone.
This is from a Nokia fan!
Indrajit
18th Nov, 2007
Let me share something interesting that happened since I posted this review.
The firmware was updated for the N73ME and I upgraded my handset. It is working ok.. but one of my colleagues with the same set has a serious problem after he upgraded it. He had to give it for repair! Anyways... my experience is.. the set it working ok as of now, and I could pair the Motorola S9 stereo bluetooth headset, since A2DP was provided, and it was working fine. Am not sure if the new Sony 980 bluetooth headset will work equally well with my upgraded N73ME. But one thing.. the phone memory has been reduced. Speed seems bit faster when I open the Menu, but is as slow as it was otherwise.
Few things are gone in the firmware update and few added. I wonder why the bluetooth A2DP support for stereo headset was not considered earlier. I do thank Nokia for this update.. but hope it doesn’t crash as it happened to my colleague’s phone. I did install few softwares and a few themes and it is working ok. Wish they added ’Presenter’ in this update. This software helps when you are going through a presentation in a meeting. It acts as a remote to change slides. After all this, am feeling little better with the set. The price has come down too to ~15k, which is a bit realistic at this time. But still I would like to mention that, I feel there are much better handsets at this price today. Also, the reason I always prefered Nokia is... there are enormous number of softwares and more available, and for free.. which hold true for any Nokia (Symbian) set.
Will inform more on the proceedings of my N73ME after the firmware update as it comes.