Nokia N78 Cell Phone Review - Software

Symbian Series 60 is a powerful and flexible operating system, with the ability to add native third party programs to extend the N78's capabilities. The web browser is amongst the best found on any cell phone.

OS (8.0)
The Nokia N78 runs Symbian Series 60 third edition, feature pack 2. The software is the latest version of Nokia's Series 60 (S60) interface for the Symbian operating system and provides one of the most powerful and flexible software platforms for mobile devices. S60 has seen incremental upgrades over the past couple of years that improve the home screen interface, make the multi-tasking features of the system more transparent and add small updates to the software. S60 still has its drawbacks, however, including overly large menus and arcane settings. Our score for S60 devices is standardized.

Home Screen Score (7.0)
The S60 Active Standby screen is a powerful and flexible home screen. At the top of the screen are indicators for power, signal strength, time and date. Below this is a strip of six customizable applications. Below these are various plugins that give you access to information and applications. There is a search plugin, calendar and tasks, Wi-Fi and an indicator for text messages. When music is playing a plugin for music also appears here. At the bottom of the screen are the labels for the two soft keys, which can also be customized by the user. The home screen is one of the more useful and powerful found on any mobile device, equivalent to the Windows Mobile Today screen and more powerful and customizable than the home screens found on BlackBerry devices or the iPhone.

Extensibility (8.0)
Symbian Series 60 is a fully fledged smart phone operating system, and the key feature of any smart phone is the ability to install and run native third party applications. There is a large library of such applications available for S60 devices like the N78, so chances are that if the phone doesn't do it out of the box you can find a program that will add the functionality you want. S60 devices also support Java applications like Opera Mini, with transparent support built into the operating system rather than having to use a separate virtual machine like some Windows Mobile phones. All of this makes the Nokia N78 one of the most extensible phones you can get.

Customizability (7.0)
The Nokia N78 offers you several customization features. On the home screen you can assign new application shortcuts and change the background image. You can also install themes to change the entire look and feel of the interface. You can also rearrange the applications in the menu so you have those you use the most in easy reach. There's also a multimedia menu that gives you quick access to various functions and you can customize the order of these items. All of these customization options should give you the ability to make the N78's interface function and look just the way you want.

OS Responsiveness (4.0)
All of the powerful software features on the Nokia N78 mean that you have to have some powerful hardware to handle it all, and unfortunately we found that often the N78 wasn't up to the task. Nokia has added quite a few fancy animated transitions to their S60 interface and the N78 seemed to take longer with these than the N82. We also had several applications hang on us and take a long time to launch, especially multimedia focused applications. We've come to expect better performance from Nokia so we found the lack of responsiveness on the N78 to be disappointing.

Browser Features (11.0)
The Nokia N78's web browser is amongst the best on any mobile device. It's one of the few to support Flash natively, and it also supports Javascript, Frames, RSS, Encryption, Cookies, auto-fill and can save web pages to the device. It supports both full HTML pages and mobile WAP pages. About the only thing missing is support for Java.

Browsing Interface (9.5)
S60 Web on the Nokia N78 is one of the best implemented mobile browsers for viewing full web pages. it renders the page as it would appear on your desktop with a few small modifications to make content more viewable on the small screen. You can get a full overview of the page and then zoom in on the section you want to view. Although not as elegant as the iPhone's Safari, it works similarly in practice.

Bookmarks and history on in Web are well implemented. You can view your current browsing history visually, when you press back you see thumbnails of the previous pages you've visited so you get a better idea of what they are. You can also see a list of URL's visited beyond the current session. Bookmarks are organized into folders, you can edit existing bookmarks and oranize them as you wish. There's also a separate folder for RSS feeds and a smart folder that automatically bookmarks all the sites you've visited previously.

There are also keypad shortcuts for quick access to many features, which is nice since one of the few drawbacks of the software is a large nested menu that can make finding what you want a bit difficult. Overall the browsing interface on S60 Web is one that most users will find freeing, especially compared to most mobile web browser.

Browser Access (8.0)
It took us five steps to access our website from the home screen on the Nokia N78. This is better than average and amongst our comparison phones only the iPhone 3G performed better. We actually found that it took fewer steps to go into the applications menu and then use a keypad shortcut to launch the browser than using the shortcut found on the home screen, as it sits in the middle of the application bar so it takes three steps to move over to it. Once in the browser we hit the 9 key to bring up the URL bar and then entered Wirelessinfo.com and hit go. Entering the URL counts as a single step.

Steps to Browse to Wirelessinfo

Gaming (4.0)
We were amazed that the Nokia N78 has not a single game loaded on the device. Usually Nokia throws on at least their Snakes game, although don't fear as this is available as a free download from their site. Still, we only award points for the phone as it comes out of the box, so Nokia gets no points for built-in games. The N78 also doesn't support Nokia's advanced N-Gage gaming platform, probably because the hardware just isn't up to it. There are a wide variety of third party games available for any S60 phone, however, and you can also install and play Java games. The controls probably won't help you out much while gaming, however, we found the D-pad to be a bit small and fiddly, while the soft keys are not very responsive. The N78 is probably not the phone for those who want a powerful mobile gaming device.

Calculator (5.0)
It's the same old calculator found on all S60 devices. Add, multiply, divide and subtract to your hearts content, but if you need advanced functions you better go find a better third party solution.

Alarm (8.0)
The alarms on the Nokia N78 provides decent functionality. You can have as many as you want and there's decent recurrence functionality, you can set it up for daily, weekly or weekdays. We would have liked the ability to create more complex recurrence, or how about the options for weekends too. It should be sufficient for most, however.

Document Software (4.0)
The Nokia N78 includes Quickoffice, which allows you to view Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents. There's no support for editing out of the box, but you can upgrade the software directly from your phone to add this functionality, for a price of course. There's also Adobe Reader on board for viewing PDF files.

Other Software (3.0)
In addition to the software we discuss above and elsewhere the Nokia N78 has a couple of other applications we'd like to award points for. The first of these is the file browser, which allows you to look at the files on your device and manage them. Next up is Nokia's Maps program, which provides local searches, directions and other mapping features. You can also purchase turn by turn voice guided directions. Last up is Nokia's Search application, which allows you to search both your device and the web for information. This application is incrediblly useful as it will let you find anything you might need on the phone or the web quickly and efficiently.