How I use my Nokia N73

Note: The Nokia N73 was very kindly given to me and a few other blog­gers to use and pro­vide feedback

The macro set­tings are the best I’ve seen on any phone

I was only kid­ding about the phone cam­era not being able to take pic­tures of fire­works, but thank you all who have offered use­ful infor­ma­tion about how to do it with­out using a nuclear pow­ered flash.

The N73, like I men­tioned, has a kick­ass cam­era, and its only just dawned on me that I’m using it more as a cam­era than a phone. I think I take 5–6 pic­tures a day with the cam­era, and make only 4–5 phone calls a day these days. And with a 2Gb mini-SD card, you can take like, many pho­tos, before you need to trans­fer them some­where else.

You could also send pic­tures you’ve taken on the N73 directly to your blog or Flickr account with Nokia’s Lifeblog appli­ca­tion, but I think I’ve ever only done that once, when blog­ging imme­di­acy neces­si­tated it. What I usu­ally do is to take a bunch of pho­tos and then trans­fer them once a day via Blue­tooth to my Power­Book G4’s iPhoto appli­ca­tion (because I also like to have bunches of pho­tos on my com­puter as well as online), then select a few to upload to my Flickr account.

But of course, there are other things I like about the phone.

When we were in the U.S., we were enam­ored by the won­der­ful road maps that were avail­able online, and which helped us tremen­dously get­ting from place to place. The prob­lem was, we didn’t have a local mobile num­ber to zap the maps to, and so, the next best thing to do was to print out the maps. But we didn’t have a printer. So how liddat?

Being the tech-savvy trav­ellers that we were, we printed the maps to PDF for­mat and Blue­toothed them into my N73, and it appeared, scrol­lable and more impor­tantly, crys­tal clear on the big-assed screen of the phone.

(Of course, the maps and the phone was in the able hands of our nav­i­ga­tor, and not the dri­ver, so we didn’t break any traf­fic rules dri­ving and fid­dling with the phone, although in Amer­ica, we saw a woman in a con­vert­ible drive with mobile phone in one hand and a latté in the other, but that’s Los Ange­les, and we know that Amer­i­cans are more skilled than us in multi-tasking).

The other use­ful thing I dis­cov­ered about the phone was the ease with which it han­dled emails. The pre­vi­ous phones I used were a lit­tle dif­fi­cult to con­fig­ure when it came to emails. So much so I gave up after a few failed login attempts. With the N73, set­ting up the five email accounts I use was a cinch. And even though I don’t always check my emails (unlike mrbrown, who, when an hour away from his com­puter, starts to become antsy) when I’m on the road, it was pretty handy when peo­ple would call and say, ‘hey, I just sent you an urgent email, can you check?’, even though they could’ve just told me what was so urgent while call­ing me to tell me they’d sent an urgent email.

Of course, being the con­sum­mate blog­ger that I am, check­ing the measly num­ber of com­ments on this blog daily is a neces­sity, and there is an RSS reader appli­ca­tion that allows me to do just that when I’m away from the com­puter or can’t get a decent wire­less hotspot sig­nal any­where. This ‘web feeds’ appli­ca­tion is part of the web browser soft­ware that is also quite kick­ass. I love the way I can look at por­tions of any web­site with­out being redi­rected to a ‘mobile’ or ‘lite’ ver­sion of the site.

If data car­riage charges for 3G ser­vices are of no con­cern to you because you are so monied, then you’d really enjoy surf­ing the web with this phone while you’re wait­ing for your wife to fin­ish look­ing at what shoes she wants to buy. Although per­son­ally, you’d do a lot bet­ter help­ing your wife look at shoes she wants to buy.

And then, there was my wed­ding speech, which I wrote on my Power­Book, saved it as a text file, and because my printer was on the blink (and even then, scraps of paper always drop out of my pock­ets), decided to Blue­tooth it to the N73 and save it to be referred to when I got up to speak. So, when the wed­ding pho­tos are out, you’ll know I wasn’t check­ing for mes­sages on my phone while I spoke.

Tech­no­rati Tags: N73, Nokia, sin­ga­pore