Nokia N78 Cell Phone Review - Messaging

The big change here is a unified interface for creating both text and multimedia messages, a big plus. Email support is solid but still falls short of BlackBerry and Windows Mobile devices.

Supported Email Services (7.5)
The Nokia N78 supports both standard POP and IMAP email servers. It will also set up settings automatically for popular services like Yahoo, Gmail or AOL. It does not support Hotmail email out of the box, although you can install Microsoft's Windows Live program for S60 to get Hotmail support.

Push Email (0.0)
Out of the box the N78 does not support any form of push email, which delivers your email to you automatically when it arrives at the server. There are programs for S60 that will add support for various push email services if you require this support.

Multiple Email Accounts (10.0)
The Nokia N78 was able to handle at least five different email accounts, which is the maximum we test for.

HTML and Attachements (8.5)
The N78 supports a limited form of HTML email. Unlike the iLG DareG or Windows Mobile phones like the Samsung Blackjack II it does not display HTML emails inside the program. Instead it will display it in plain text. It will provide you with a link to view the full HTML email in the web browser, however, and we will award half points for this. The N78 also supports a wide variety of attachments, with the view-only version of Quickoffice on board to view Word, Excel and Powerpoint files. There's also Adobe Reader for PDF attachments and a zip program to open zip files.

Email Customizations (2.0)
The only email customization options on the Nokia N78 is the ability to add signatures to emails. There's no support for changing the font of emails, viewing height or any other options.

Time to a New Email Message (6.58)
Creating a new email message on the N78 was rather speedy at an average of 3.04 seconds. This is the time it took us to go from the home screen until we had a new email interface on screen. You can see below that this is faster than average, and much faster than the N82. It's not quite as fast as the iPhone 3G or the Blackjack II however.

We were able to get our speedy time thanks to the left soft key shortcut on the home screen, which is assigned to the messaging application. From here we just pressed in to select the create new message option and moved to the bottom of the list to choose new email. You can get even faster times by adding a shortcut to create a new email message to your home screen. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

Time to a New Email (sec)

Email Usability (6.0)
The S60 email program has changed little over the past couple of years, which is a little bit of a shame since it's not as efficient an email interface as other smart phone platforms like BlackBerry or Windows Mobile. When you enter the messaging program you get a list of all your mailboxes, with the inbox assigned to text and multimedia messages and each email account with its own separate inbox. Drafts, Sent and Outbox are shared across all message types.

Open a box and you get a list of all the messages in that box. You can then switch between boxes by moving left/right on the D-Pad. The left soft key opens a menu that gives you various options like reply, delete, etc. There are also some keypad shortcuts, in particular you can hit the C button to delete a selected message and when viewing a message just press in on the D-Pad to get a quick list of options. Overall the interface is fairly straightforward, but it lacks the ease of switching between boxes, unified inbox and other features that some other platforms offer.

Instant Messaging (0.0)
The Nokia N78 has a Jabber messaging client built in, but we don't award points for this messaging platform. It does not support any of the more popular services like AIM, Windows Live or Yahoo messenger out of the box.

MMS Support (9.0)
One of our biggest complaints about MMS support on previous S60 devices was that Nokia was still requiring you to use two different interfaces to create a multimedia message versus a simple text message. We're very happy to see that on the N78 this has finally been addressed. There is a single message interface and you can easily turn it into an MMS message by going to the left soft key menu and choosing Insert Content. The integration with the camera and album software is also very good.

SMS Smiley Face Interpretation (0.0)
The Nokia N78 neither supports displaying smiley faces as graphical images, nor does it allow you to easily insert smiley faces. The N78 says: smile not.

SMS/MMS Ease of Use (6.0)
Messaging is a single program on the N78 for both text and email messages, so much of what we mentioned about the interface in the email usability section above applies here as well. There is a list of folders, with a unified inbox that holds all of your text and multimedia messages. When in a folder you can switch to the next or previous folder using left/right on the D-Pad and the left soft key brings up a list of options for the currently selected message. Overall the interface is straightforward and easy to use.

Time to a New SMS Message (5.88)
It took us an average of 1.6 seconds to create a new text message on the N78. This is a very speedy time, you can see below that it's almost a full second faster than average, although several of our comparison phones were as fast or faster. We were helped in this by a shortcut on the home screen that takes you directly to a new text message interface. For more information on how we conduct this test see this article.

Time to a new SMS (sec)