Nokia N73 Review - Multimedia

Alfredo Padilla
Published on May 04, 2007 Comment on this

Accessing Music Software (4.61)

To test how easy it is to access the music software on a phone we time how long it takes to go from the home screen to playing a song in the software. We repeat this test five times and then take the average for our score. This took an average of 4.34 seconds on the Nokia N73. This is a solid score, about the same as the Treo 750's 4.36 seconds and faster than some music centric phones like the LG Chocolate (4.73 seconds) and Sprint Upstage (6.54 seconds). The N73 is helped in this test because a shortcut to the music software is included on the home screen by default.

Dedicated Music Controls (0.0)
The Nokia N73 has no dedicated controls for music, instead a plugin is placed on your home screen when music is playing that allows you to change the volume from the home screen and quickly switch to the music player. Unless this plugin is selected however not even the volume keys will work to change music volume.

Music Software Functionality and Organization (8.0)

The Nokia N73 allows you to create and edit playlists on the device and also recognized our test playlist. It was able to recognize music tags for our test WMA and Mp3 files, but not for our test AAC file. You can view tracks by title, artist, album, genre or composer. We were also pleased to see that you can search through your tracks using multi-tap. As we mentioned the software is easily accessible from your home screen either via the shortcut or when music is playing via the music plugin.

The library can automatically search your device for music tracks and will play music in the background while you access other phone features. It does not however support album art, ratings or visualizations. We were pleased to see an equalizer that has presets, lets you edit for them and allows you to create your own presets. Overall we were very pleased with the range of functionality we found on the Nokia N73's music software.

Online Song Downloading (0.0)
The Nokia N73 does not support any direct music download services.

Streaming (0.0)
The Nokia N73 was unable to play streaming music from our test website. This includes streaming MP3, WMA and Real audio. We were rather dissappointed to see this in a smart phone as other phones such as the Treo 750 or T-Mobile Dash were able to play streaming WMA music.

Podcast Support (0.0)
The Nokia N73 does not ship with any software for downloading and organizing podcasts. Nokia does however offer a free download of podcast software that provides excellent functionality.

Music Sync with PC (7.0)
You can synchronize music to your Nokia N73 by connecting the device by to your PC with the included USB cable and choosing Data Transfer mode. Windows Media Player on the PC will then recognize your device as a storage device, allowing you to easily move music over.

Music Formats and DRM (3.5)
The Nokia N73 supports most major music formats, including AAC, Mp3 and WMA. Nokia's manual states that it "..can access content protected with OMA DRM 2.0 and OMA DRM 1.0." You should check with your content retailer to find out if their content is comptible with this type of DRM. We know for a fact that iTunes protected content is not, however some online music stores that use Microsoft's Plays For Sure content may be compatible.

Music Interruption (10.0)
The Nokia N73 handled interruption of music playback by a phone call admirably; pausing the music while the call was taken and then restarting playback from the same point when the call ended.

Video

Video Software Access (2.05)

To test how easy it is to play back video on the N73 we timed how long it took to go from the home screen to playing back a video. The Nokia N73 took an average of 9.74 seconds to complete this process. This is a poor score for a phone and is worse than the Treo 750 (6.88 seconds), T-Mobile Dash (4.83 seconds) and Sanyo M1 (3.7 seconds). The Nokia N73 is hurt in this test by the fact that it's Realplayer software for playing back video is buried in the menu system. Once in the software you will have to plunge through the menus and folder system to find the specific file you want to play back. It is faster to access you video files using the gallery application, although you may need to wade through all of your photos and videos to find the specific one you want.

Video Controls (4.0)

When playing back a video on the Nokia N73 you can use the joystick up/down to fast forward or rewind. Pressing in on the joystick pauses the video and pressing in again will allow you to restart it. The left soft key also pauses the clip and when paused will give you access to the options menu. The volume rocker keys on the right side of the phone control playback volume. We were not particularly impressed with the video controls on the N73 as we found them unintuitive. We preferred the controls found on Windows Media Player on the Treo 750 or T-Mobile Dash which provide more controls and allow you to reconfigure the controls for your own needs.

Video Software & Organization (1.0)
The Nokia N73 uses Realplayer for video playback. We were not impressed with this software as there are no library management features and most functions are unintuitive. For example when you press in on the joystick to pause video playback you would expect that pressing in again would restart it, and it does, but first it makes you choose continue from a menu that pops up. Similarly the only way to switch to full screen while a clip is playing back is to first pause the video and then choose "continue in full screen" from the menu. Video software like Windows Media Player on Windows Mobile devices is much more polished and easy to use.

Realplayer on the Nokia N73 does not include any video management features failing to include a library or support for playlists. If you want to organize your videos you will need to do so in the gallery or at the file folder level. This is dissapointing for a device that Nokia markets as a multimedia computer.

Video Sync with PC (7.0)
As with music you can synchronize videos to your Nokia N73 by conneting the device by to your PC with the included USB cable and choosing Data Transfer mode. Windows Media Player on the PC will then recognize your device as a storage device, allowing you to easily move videos in your library over.

Video Formats (3.0)
The Nokia N73 manual states that it supports .3gp, .mp4 and.rm encoded files, however it also states that it is unable to open files that are not compliant with 3GPP standards. We saw this first hand as our sample .mp4 files encoded in H264 caused the phone to crash. We were able to play two of our three test .3gp files, those encoded with H263, and we were also able to play our test .rm files, although it did not create a thumbnail in gallery. Other file formats such as windows media, flash and quicktime were not supported. We wish that Nokia had invested in better codecs for the Series 60 platform as it is just confusing for users to tell them that it will play some files in some formats. Not to mention that having one of those possible suppported file types lead to a total freeze of the phone is simply unacceptable.

Video DRM (0.0)
The Nokia N73 does not support DRM protected video.

Video Playback Smoothness (10.0)
To test video playback smoothness we play back five different 3GP files of increasing bit rates to see at what point the phone starts to struggle with video playback. We were happy to see that all five of our test 3GP files ranging from 48kbps to 768kbps played back without problem.

Online Video Downloading (0.0)
The Nokia N73 does allow you to download videos via the built in link in the gallery, however this video download service is extremely limited with only five small videos available, as such we did not award any points for it. True video download services that give you access to premium content are not supported by the N73.

Video Streaming unscored
Because there is no standardization of streaming video we do not score this section. We do however test a couple of sites to see if the phone is able to handle streaming video. The Nokia N73 was able to handle streaming 3GP video from zoovision.com, but was unable to handle streaming windows media video from windowsmedia.com. This is what we would expect given that the N73 does not support windows media video.

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