The N73 has quietly become the phone Nokia is selling to everybody, and I find that more interesting than anything in the N-series flagship tier.
Nokia’s problem for years has been that its good phones were either cheap and dull or expensive and strange. The N-series was supposed to fix the top end, and its early attempts were mostly exercises in cramming. The N90 was a swivelling brick that nobody wanted to hold. The N91 had a hard drive in it, which sounded impressive right up until you felt the weight. Those were engineering demonstrations wearing the costume of consumer products.
The N73 is the first one that behaves like something a normal person would choose. It is a candybar. It fits a pocket. The 3.2-megapixel Carl Zeiss lens with autofocus is the best camera Nokia has shipped in a phone that is not shaped like a science project, and the results in daylight are genuinely usable rather than merely acceptable for a phone.
The flash is where I would push back on the enthusiasm. It is an LED, and an LED is not a flash, it is a torch that fires briefly. Sony Ericsson put a xenon tube in the K800i and the difference in a dim room is not subtle, it is the difference between a photograph and a smeared orange memory of one. Nokia has the better sensor and lens on paper and loses most indoor shots anyway, which is a decent reminder that megapixels are the least important number on the spec sheet.
S60 remains the tax you pay. Symbian 9.1 underneath is a solid piece of engineering and the interface sitting on top of it is a maze. Settings live three levels deep in categories that make sense only to the person who built them. Installing anything means a dialogue about certificates. The phone is capable of a great deal and it hides almost all of it, and Nokia appears entirely comfortable with that, presumably because the people buying N73s in volume never go looking.
Which is really the point. What Nokia has worked out, and its competitors have not, is that the phone selling in volume does not need to be the phone that wins the specification argument. It needs to be the one sitting at a price a carrier will subsidise into the free tier, with a camera good enough that the owner stops carrying a compact, in a shape that does not embarrass anybody. The N73 is that phone. It is not exciting. It is going to sell for years.
The strategic read is less comfortable for Nokia than the sales figures suggest. Calling these things multimedia computers rather than phones is marketing that is trying to describe something real, and the real thing is that the device is becoming a general purpose computer with a radio attached. Nokia is winning that transition on hardware and losing it on software, and the gap between how good the N73’s camera module is and how bad it feels to change a setting is the whole problem in miniature.
I would still recommend it to most people asking, which is the highest compliment I can pay a phone this year. Buy it for the camera, tolerate the menus, and do not pay extra for anything higher in the range, because you will be paying for a spec sheet rather than a better object.