Just said goodbye to my 2 year old K790i for around 5.5K!
It served me, my purpose for 2 years very well and easily one of the best phones ever produced by Sony! In a typical JAVA based OS, one would contemplate the features to be a tad less than its counterparts but exceptionally, word guesser, T9 dictionary, Magic Word plus third party application support and last but not the least, JAVA OS’s splendid countermeasures against viruses as compared to Symbian OSes, made this phone a must to have. I was earlier bent towards N73M, but traded my actions with a thought of K790i because:
N73M is music edition just for sake of its music tag. Nothing more than that. None can match the stupendous music quality delivered by SE. I just plugged the HPM-70, through jack in N73 and I was stuttering while trying to praise N73M’s music capability. And when I plugged in the same HPM-70 into K790i, I was blown away! No doubt, Nokia has rebound well with latest handsets with well-equipped music features, but still they are no match for old SE Walkman series!
I found N73M to be quite big, heavy and ugly, compared to K790i. The plastic touch, it felt like holding a plastic Pepsi bottle, you are ready to gulp down any moment. Also, its camera with poor LED flash and naturally poor results in low light conditions snapped my belief in uncanny Nokia. And all that for 1.5-2K more than K790i? No way!
N73M’s OS’s speed was slow, though it’s quite vivid in application areas and has lot more to offer than K790i, but still was a dud on main features. It has got frequent restart problems, crashes while you are talking, slow execution of JAR files etc.
Almost my whole office has got N73 or N73M. I didn’t want to get in the crowd. Even they praised it, whereas I didn’t do the same to their Nokia!
For a bourgeois person like me, I found K790i damn VFM whereas N73M was just a typical over-hyped piece of technology which had nothing to offer but an increased price tag!
Battery backup of K790i was way much better than N73M, around 2-3 days, whereas N73M has once reportedly worn out in 22.5 hours!
Once mistakenly, K790i slipped out of my hands from top of my 4 stories house, much to my horror. I assumed it to be dead when I was running on my way to retrieve it. But its body was wrecked; battery was thrown out, that’s it! Its body took the whole wrath on itself, saving the phone from a certain dead-end. The body change cost me 430/-. N73 (older version) got shattered when it fell from a moving bus on the ground. I remembered the weeping lady’s face and decided K790i is much sturdier.
Well nothing is perfect I found some glitches with it:
After 5-6 months of surreal company with you K790i, you will feel déjà vu while using it. Thus making it no more than a paper weight, just to take phone calls and messaging! Whereas in Nokia N73M, you need almost a year (atleast I do!) to learn its features and applications it possess!
After 8-10 months, joystick behaves if its set free. It sometimes responds way too faster and sometimes it will make you scream to make it work, particularly at emergency hours!
Believe me apart from above 2 naïve glitches, I didn’t found a single malfunction in it! And I am still missing it while writing it!
PS: Please note that, it’s my personal take on comparison b/w two competitors, my own views and opinions. One should not take it personally and feel offended.