Secondly, the only reason I’m reviewing Windows Phone 7 is because Telstra were kind enough to give me a free HTC Mozart. I’d like to assume that this is because I’m internet famous and an all-round awesome person, but it’s more likely that they thought this long-term Mac and iPhone using, incredibly cynical and generally grumpy guy would be a good critic of an ‘exciting’ new device from a company that is only slightly more interesting than the soles of my feet (you can interpret that as a comment about Telstra, HTC, or Microsoft, it’s your call). Or maybe they drew my name from a hat.

With that out of the way, let’s attempt to piece together a review of Windows Phone 7 without resorting to dropping a “Microsoft sux” and a few “developers, developers”. Keep in mind that this is in no way an exhaustive review of Windows Phone 7 – there are plenty of professional reviewers to do that kind of thing. This is just me, using the phone, and telling you what I liked and didn’t like.

The Good

You might have heard: Windows Phone 7 is pretty. If you haven’t, let me enlighten you: Windows Phone 7 is pretty. Not pretty in the “I can’t stop looking at that cheerleader/lifeguard” sense, but more in the “I can’t stop looking at that Lava Lamp” regard. It’s unashamedly minimalist – in a world saturated with the gradients of the iPhone and the utilitarian design of Android, it’s quite refreshing. Everything is simple colours and basic shapes. There are some fantastic transitions between menus, when starting applications, and selecting UI elements, but they never seem to get in the way. In fact, these transitions tend to provide a neat distraction to stop you realising that Windows Phone 7 doesn’t have an inkling of multi-tasking ability, and as such switching between applications is akin to trying to change lanes in peak hour. But more on that later.

The home screen on Windows Phone 7 is made up of live tiles – shortcuts to applications that can update to give you an insight into what’s happening. The Calendar live tile, for instance, shows your next appointment, and any email accounts you pin to the home screen give you a count of unread messages. This is good. Little red badges on the iPhone can only go so far, and while Android and Windows Phone share similar toaster-style notifications that pop in at the top of the screen, this doesn’t give you a whole lot of information for the times when you just want to glance into your mobile world and see what’s happening. Live tiles are quite well implemented by the built-in applications, but when it comes to third-party apps, I’m yet to see anything compelling.

While navigating your way around Windows Phone 7, you tend to come across quite a few nice surprises. This is good and bad, however, since it does mean that the fastest way of doing things is not always the most intuitive. I can appreciate the small conveniences like being able to tap on the very edge of an email in any of the folder views to bring up the check boxes for multiple selections. That’s pretty intuitive, but having to long press on the title of the People app to get additional options (one of the few places this works) is not. Some features sit on the fence between intuitive and hidden, like being able to press on one of the letter headings in an alphabetically sorted list (like your contacts) to bring up a grid of buttons to quickly jump to another letter. Makes perfect sense once you’ve done it once, but i spent quite a bit of time scrolling before I realized. Then you feel a little silly for not having guessed.

Despite most of the launch devices having very limited storage capacity (8GB is weak these days), the Zune music experience in Windows Phone 7 is a joy. Streaming songs through a Zune Pass works almost as well as playing music from the phone itself, which goes some way to help the storage situation. Even syncing was a pleasant surprise – given that I’m a Mac user, I was impressed when Microsoft’s Windows Phone Connector seamlessly transferred music and playlists from iTunes to the phone. While you’re playing music from the Zune application, it downloads images of the artist (not just cover art, but publicity photos as well) and uses them as a background in the application, and on the Zune live tile. Little touches like this go a long way to creating a fun experience with a phone.

It’s worth mentioning that the voice control in Windows Phone 7 is excellent. This is something that often falls by the wayside, but Microsoft has nailed it. The voice control on the iPhone 4 and 3GS is pretty good, but where Windows Phone gets it very right is the time between pressing the button and actually being able to speak a command. On the iPhone, this seems to take an age, but Windows Phone 7 is ready and listening almost instantly.

The Bad

The unfortunate way to summarize this section is simply “everything else”. There are a lot of glaring omissions, and practically every good experience is followed shortly thereafter with a new frustration. Let’s get the easy ones out of the way: there is no copy and paste. There is no multi-tasking. There are no custom ringtones. Windows Phone will not make you breakfast. Yes, these things really suck, and no I am not going to talk about them anymore.

The real problems are in the small details. The internal monologue generally follows something like this:

Wow, the Zune application is nice! Oh, why do I have to press the volume keys and change the volume to get to the skip track button?

Wow, the email client has nice filtering and easy shortcuts! Wait, why is there no message threading?

Wow, easy access to search in a nice UI! Oh, it’s Bing.

The email client is perhaps the worst culprit. It’s unfathomable to me why one would make a shortcut to change folders, but then only have the list show your inbox without a second tap. Message threading is also such a basic feature to leave out these days, especially on a device with an implementation of Exchange right from the source. The Exchange implementation itself seems a little clunky as well – email comes in with push effectively instantly, but deleting and moving emails and syncing the read status to the server seems to only happen every 10mins or so, if at all, whereas it happens instantly on the desktop and on an iPhone.

Since the iPhone and other devices have convinced people that using the internet on a small screen is a good idea (and with good text reflow, it is), browsers have become such a crucial part of a mobile device. Let’s not beat around the bush, Microsoft doesn’t have the greatest record of building good browsers. And in perhaps the greatest understatement in some time, Internet Explorer on Windows Phone 7 is a pile of crap. The design of the browser is nice, but then like an unexpected kick in the nether-regions, you browse to a site and the pain sets in.

I will say that the scrolling performance in Internet Explorer is good. That’s where the pleasantries end. It uses the old desktop Internet Explorer adage of rendering things in the ugliest way possible, and supports none of the newer CSS3 and HTML5 features that make browsing, especially on modern mobile websites, just a joy on the iPhone and Android. There is no Flash (which isn’t the end of the world), but there is also no HTML5 video. YouTube can be played back by installing an application from the Marketplace that appears to be just a shortcut to the YouTube mobile site, but in fact does something behind the scenes to get it working. Though not entirely the fault of Windows Phone 7, most sites default to the mobile version designed for 5 year old Nokia phones, though even if they didn’t I doubt Internet Explorer could render their modern counterparts anyway.

The Marketplace is still fairly sparse of 3rd party software, and what is there is generally not as fully featured as equivalents on Android or iPhone, but even if there were a million applications you’d not be able to find them. When you push that magical search button in the application Marketplace, you’re presented with results mixed in with music and videos from the Zune store, and no way of filtering. You can also only search application names, so unless that recipe application is conveniently called “recipe application”, you’re plum out of luck. Carrier billing (having application purchases charge to your phone bill) is something that’s been lacking with modern phones, and I’m really happy to see it back with Windows Phone 7.

Contact synchronisation on Windows Phone 7 is a nice idea – link your Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, and many other popular social networks to your Windows Live ID, and you get a nice unified view of your social life. The status update stream works well enough, but only your Facebook contacts can become part of your general contacts list, and only if you add your account separately to the phone. Once added, you can’t filter Facebook contacts out, either.

Gaming

I am nothing more than a casual gamer. Frankly, between work and a one year old son, killing zombies is the very last thing I want to do when I get some downtime. Though it does have competition from writing reviews about free phones in the I-can’t-be-bothered stakes. That said, I do have an Xbox 360, and when I’ve caught up on some sleep, I love to play it. If I had more time, I’d probably play it far more often.

Windows Phone 7, as a gaming platform, is the best around. Xbox Live is integrated perfectly, and not only are you able to earn achievements in-game that appear right on your traditionally Xbox 360-only gamer card, but you can also edit your avatar, send messages, and modify your friends list. This is what Apple’s Game Center should have been. It’s far more rich and integrated than Apple’s effort, and stands alone on the list of great mobile gaming hubs.

Unfortunately, the games themselves are far more average. Graphics seem choppy, and there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of detail. Loading times can also be a big frustration, with even something as simple as Uno taking longer than you would expect to get to some gameplay. There isn’t a huge library of games available at this early stage, but Microsoft seems to have buy-in from a lot of the bigger publishers, so well-known titles like Need For Speed and Earthworm Jim are well represented.

I’d really like to see Xbox Live on Windows Phone when some really powerful hardware comes out. The immersive platform is a little let down by the in-game quality right now, but that could turn around with smoother and prettier games.

The Mozart

I’ve refrained from talking too much about the actual hardware of the HTC Mozart we were given up until this point, but that’s mainly because it’s nothing spectacular on its own. Windows Phone 7 is the real innovation here, and the Mozart is somewhat of a ‘good enough’ piece of technology.

Once Telstra fixed up their mobile access point settings for users of push email, the Mozart battery made it happily through a day of use, which is all you really expect these days. The phone feels slightly above average in the hand, though it has nowhere near the premium aura that surrounds the iPhone 4. It’s body is apparently made out of a single piece of aluminium, but it all just feels like plastic to me, and it still has all the creaks and squeaks you’d expect from a mid-range device.

The 8MP camera is nothing special, but the inclusion of a xenon flash is a very welcome addition. Dark scenes are very well illuminated, but using the flash only amplifies the camera’s tendancy to take washed out photos.

Call speaker quality is great, though there is a lack of noise reduction from the microphone, so calls in loud places get a little difficult for the person on the other end. This isn’t a huge deal though, since most people I call don’t want to hear what I’ve got to say anyway. Apparently, the phone includes the amusingly named SRS WOW HD (capitalization all theirs) for virtual surround sound when you listen to music, but I couldn’t tell much of a difference with it on or off.

Closing Thoughts

Excitement, followed by disappointment. This is the general feeling of Windows Phone 7. With all its money and more than capable staff, I didn’t expect a “version 1″ OS from Microsoft, despite the fact that Windows Phone 7 is a complete from-scratch rewrite. And herein lies the problem – people expect a version 1 to be on par with features to everything else that’s on the market, which is probably unreasonable. Windows Phone 7 shows a lot of promise, however, and I do believe that with a string of rapid updates, it could actually make a dent in the market.

As it stands, I can’t use Windows Phone 7 as my day-to-day phone. But adding the missing features I crave would be relatively trivial: Give me threaded email, copy and paste, and at the very least a way of suspending apps so it’s not a clean launch every time you switch task. Let’s see that, then we’ll talk.

Fever List View

The premise of Fever is simple: your current RSS reader is full of unread items that you’ll never get through, you can’t keep up with the volume, and you don’t want to add more subscriptions for fear of compounding the problem. Clearly, Fever is aimed at RSS ‘power users,’ and people with only a few subscriptions should probably save themselves the effort and stick to a simpler solution like Google Reader or NewsGator. That said, can Fever really live up to the premise of saving you from second inbox overload?

Fever is the latest endeavor from venerable designer/developer Shaun Inman, creator of the renowned website statistics package Mint. At it’s core, Fever is a regular RSS reader, with the ability to group feeds and read through each feed, group of feeds, or all of your feeds in an attractive river-of-news style view. Like Google Reader, Fever has nice features like endless scrolling (loading more unread items as you approach the bottom of the current list automatically), but unlike Google Reader, Fever is self-hosted, meaning you must have a web server to run it on. Also going against the grain of online RSS readers, Fever costs money – US$30 to be exact. That’s a fair chunk of cash considering most other readers, desktop and otherwise, are free.

Fever Hot List

Beyond simple RSS reading, however, Fever’s banner feature and one thing that could make it worth the purchase for some is it’s Hot list. To use the Hot list properly, Fever asks the user to split their subscriptions into two categories: Kindling, which are your must-read subscriptions, and Sparks, which are less important and higher volume feeds. Once this is done, the Fever Hot list becomes essentially an automatic, personal Digg. Fever uses the sites that the Sparks link to in order to ignite the Kindling, bubbling the popular and active items to the top of the list. This means you can always see the most important items from your subscriptions at a glance, and leave reading the rest until later (or not at all).

This feature does have a few limitations though, most notably the fact that it can’t determine what is a link to a real news item, and what is a link to a home page, privacy policy, or other non-news pages. For example, if you subscribe to many Weblogs Inc. feeds, you will find that the Weblogs privacy policy hits the top of your Hot list very quickly, since it’s linked to at the bottom of every Weblogs post. Similarly, sites like the Twitter homepage, which seem to get linked to everywhere these days, will also run to the top. Thankfully, Fever has a URL blacklist, so once you spend a bit of time blocking these types of things, the Hot list becomes a pretty damn useful feature, showing you the news articles that are most popular amongst your subscriptions

Fever iPhone Item View

One feature that is very important to me is a mobile version of the reader. Google Reader has a great iPhone compatible site that I use all the time, it’s a solid UI and quite fast, but Fever one-ups Reader’s mobile site by not only looking a whole lot better, but also bringing across the infinite scrolling from it’s full version. This means that when you are flipping down the page on your iPhone and nearing the bottom, it’ll load up more items in the background so can can keep on scrolling, making reading feeds very fast.

Fever iPhone Frame

One thing I don’t like about the iPhone UI is that if you try to open an external link in a feed item, it adds it’s own frame to the top of the page, which would be fine if it didn’t mess up the view port every time you tried to go back to the reading list. This can be fixed with a quick change of orientation of your phone, but it is annoying none the less. This feature is necessary because of another Fever feature, the ability to be used as a chromeless web app. If you bookmark Fever on your iPhone home screen, it get’s itself a nice icon and starts up without the Safari UI over the top of it.

On the technical front, Fever was very easy to install. After setting up a database for it to use and running the compatibility checker, you need only enter your activation code  for everything to be set up and ready. Updates to Fever are pulled automatically, and you can automate the fetching of new feeds via a simple cron job on your server. It doesn’t seem like you can automatically fetch feeds at less than 15 minute intervals with the cron job, though the Fever UI has a refresh button you can hit at any time to reload feeds from the browser.

Fever includes a few niceties like a bookmarklet so you can easily subscribe to feeds while browsing, which is handy since Fever cannot be set as a default feed reader for your browser or operating system. Keyboard shortcuts are fully supported, and are actually more logical than those in Google Reader, and a pretty effective search feature is available.

Overall, Fever is an extremely slick, fast, and well-featured RSS reader. The Hot list feature is it’s main differentiator from Google Reader and other online RSS readers, as well as the ability to control the feed refresh interval instead of relying on whatever schedule the developer has chosen. It’s also a hell of a lot faster than Google Reader when browsing a lot of items – I find Firefox slows to a crawl with Reader after about 500 items, but not so with Fever. Is it worth $30? No, not when the RSS reader market price has bottomed out at $0, but for people with a lot of subscriptions, it is a great package. If you don’t mind parting with your $30, I can highly recommend Fever, but I think it would get a lot more users if it were priced at about $15. I’d also like the option of turning off the Fever header when clicking links on the iPhone version when running in full Safari, but otherwise Fever is almost perfect.

After reviewing the original i-mate JAQ back in November last year, I did not have particularly high hopes for the JAQ3. The original JAQ was i-mate’s first handset after parting ways with HTC, who designed and manufactured its handsets for some time, and was flawed in many ways. The JAQ did show promise though, and I am happy to report that virtually everything that was wrong about the JAQ has been remedied with the JAQ3. Manufactured by Chinese OEM TechFaith Wireless and sold in some markets as the UBiQUiO 501, the i-mate JAQ3 is a Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC Phone Edition device, and comes packed with connectivity features and a thin, albeit wide, design.

Physical Aspects

Unlike most Pocket PC Phone Edition devices, the i-mate JAQ3 has a front facing QWERTY keyboard instead of a sideways slide-out design. This has plusses and minuses, as it increases one-handed usability though adds quite a bit of width to the device. This design does allow the device to come in at just 14.5mm (0.57”) thick, making it the thinnest touch-screen Windows Mobile phone around currently. Length and width measure up at 126mm x 67.5mm (4.96″ x 2.65″) respectively, and a weight of 160g (5.64oz) is a little on the hefty side, but not overly so.

The back and sides of the i-mate JAQ3 are covered in a soft-touch rubber compound, with the front and bottom a slightly glossy hard plastic. Thankfully, it is not glossy enough to attract mass amounts of fingerprints, which is somewhat of a pet hate of mine. Decked out in black, the device looks quite classy, and will look right at home coming out of a briefcase or suit pocket. The right side of the device holds the 2.5mm headset jack, miniUSB port, and power button, with the three-way jog wheel, OK button, and camera key taking residence on the left. The 2.0 megapixel camera is the sole item on the back of the JAQ3, positioned above the easy to release yet firmly attached battery cover, itself hiding a 1250mAh battery. A covered microSD memory card slot sits atop the JAQ3, with the hard to release extendable stylus held in a silo the bottom, though it did get easier to get out over time.

I will make somewhat of a big proclamation now: the i-mate JAQ3 has the best QWERTY keypad I have ever used on a phone. With the exception of the space key, every key has great tactile feedback, adequate spacing that is accentuated with a convex shape, and is just about the perfect size. The only thing I can fault is that while there is only one space ‘key,’ it has a pressure point at either side, which caused me to occasionally get two spaces when I hit the key plumb in the middle. Even the special characters, accessed with the Fn key, are intelligently placed. Big softkeys, call and end keys, the OK and Start button, and shortcut keys for Pocket IE and the Messaging application surround a very large 5-way directional pad. Unfortunately, the same level of quality found on the keyboard isn’t shared with the jog wheel, which has a terrible feel when pressed to select items. I also wish the keyboard backlight stayed on a little longer, or better yet, had a setting to control the time it stayed on.

The i-mate JAQ3 has a bright, relatively clear QVGA resolution touch screen, though its landscape 2.4” screen is smaller than most other Pocket PC phones. This is further perceptible due to the handset’s size. Other than the size, there is not a lot to complain about, with the screen accurately detecting taps with the stylus, and having adequate readability even in bright sunlight.

Ori says:

I am a business owner in Northern NJ with 23 Verizon Wireless phones. Many of them are the Kyocera SE47 Slider, which I think is one of the best phones that Verizon has ever carried.

I have been waiting for a long time for Verizon to come out with a new compact, durable slider. I did not like the Chocolate and was happy to see the Samsung SCH-U620 with all of its features. After reading the following pros and cons you can decide if having a TV in your hand is worth the trouble.

I would like to thank Rudy, the Verizon Wireless manager of the GSP store in Paramus, NJ for his help.

Pros

• Well built slider with spring action
• Many tasks that do not require the keypad can be done without opening the slider. These tasks include: answering calls, dialing recent callers, viewing text messages (see negative comment about ‘direct view’), watching TV, viewing missed calls, taking pictures, and more. You must ‘unlock’ the face keys before performing these tasks to prevent accidental operation. This is an advantage over the limitations of the SE47
• Nice display with vibrant colors, though it is a battery drainer
• Live streaming TV – this is a great feature and the quality is excellent, but again drains the battery
• I know that the signal in the NYC area is not yet at full strength, but I get good reception in many places in Northern NJ, except inside the Verizon wireless store on Rt. 4 west in Paramus
• Loud speakerphone and sensitive microphone
• Nice large keypad compared to the Kyocera SE47 for easy text messaging
• Large fonts
• Easy to navigate the menu and get used to the features
• Side buttons are easy to operate and do not interrupt normal operation if accidentally pressed

Cons

• No “Backup Assistant” in Get-It-Now, so you can’t transfer the phone book that you saved online. I had 250 contacts and more that 800 saved numbers. Thanks go to Darryl at the Paramus store who took my advice to use the data cable from the Samsung SCH-A930 and my old SE47 and was able to transfer all my contacts and most of my numbers. This is a major screw-up by whoever put the software inside this phone
• While charging the phone the display is always on, this slows down the charging time and possibly prevents the phone from ever reaching a full charge. The display is so bright while charging that I had to turn the phone over so I could darken my bedroom at night
• Extra small font when browsing the net with Mobile Web compared to the large fonts on the same page if you are using the Samsung SCH-U740 (thanks again Rudy). I am 44 years old and see 20/20, but the fonts are too small to get used too
• Many ‘security errors’ on the browser while viewing my ‘Mobil Mail’ on Go Daddy’s secure site. I view the exact same page with the U740 and did not get one error. The error kept on coming over and over and only after refreshing three times per email for the first five emails was the problem gone, though it kept coming back with every new session
• No external buttons for the music player. Only the standard V CAST music player
• While playing music the V CAST red screen is on at all times and drains the battery. There is no way to turn it off, so expect less than two hours of playing time before you need to recharge.
• The menu lacks basic features like ‘Direct View’ for text messages; this is a slider with one front display so why not make a direct view like the one on the SE47?
• There are weird icons that are not in the icon glossary – this morning I setup the phone for a data call, and while setting it up a notification appeared explaining that the phone will switch to data mode for the next 10 minutes. When the call was done I had an icon on the display that looks like two ‘A’s for about three hours, and then it was gone
• Battery life is bad. Even though it says 1000MaH on the battery, it holds less charge than the 800MaH of the U740 and much less than the SE47. In today’s connected world, when a company comes out with products for people ‘on-the-go,’ they need to accommodate those users. Selling a phone with a battery life of less than two hours of use (calling, Mobile Web, text messaging, and music playing) and less than one hour of TV is irresponsible to customers. An extended battery is not officially sold by Verizon, though eBay has them
• My biggest disappointment came Tuesday night at 8pm when I was away from home and wanted to watch American Idol on this gadget, but all I found on FOX was LA Law re-runs for the next 2 hours. I checked the guide and there was not even a scheduled American Idol show. This is an issue with V CAST TV though, not the handset itself
• On the ‘Send Text Message’ screen when selecting ‘Add Recipient’ with the soft key one of the options is ‘Recent Calls,’ but not ‘Recent Messages.’ You can only see those who called you last or outgoing calls but not any of your recent text message transactions. If you want to send an SMS to the last person that sent you an SMS you have to find that person again in the contact list or go to the ‘Inbox,’ find the SMS, open it, and reply (so much trouble for a simple task). This is so simple on the SE47

My overall impression of this phone is that it was well built, well equipped, but poorly planned, poorly engineered, and overall performs poorly.

Pros

• The new effects are nice, and not too intrusive.
• I completely agree with Greg Hughes, everything does run considerably faster. I have been having performance issues with Outlook 2007 since the betas, but finally it runs at a normal speed. Unlike Greg, I do run Aero Glass.
• The Sidebar is nice, but see below in the cons section for my issues with it.
• Flip 3D is mainly eye candy, but I like it.
• The updated user security model is welcome, and even being a power user, I think I will still get some benefit out of it. The administrator authorization boxes are very intrusive though, blacking out everything on the screen but the dialog box.
• While Vista seems to take longer to start up, it resumes from sleep and hibernate much faster than XP.

Cons

• I am not convinced about the Aero Glass look. It is nice, but the way window title bars go black when they are maximized doesn’t sit well with me.
• Windows Media Player is ugly, ugly, ugly with Aero Glass. Way too much transparency.
• While it is nice, I feel the Sidebar could have been better implemented. I am a fan of sidebars, but the one included with Windows Vista can look quite messy, as sometimes gadgets don’t seem to line up well. I also hate that you can’t resize gadgets or the Sidebar itself. I’ll be running with it for a few days, but I am not sure if it will be a permanent fixture. I used an application called Desktop Sidebar some time ago, and it was a much better solution.
• I cannot for the life of me work out how to undock toolbars from the taskbar. I used to run with a toolbar docked to the side of my screen with the quick launch bar and my desktop icons in it, but I now can’t do that.

I will probably add to this list over the coming days as I discover new things that I like and that annoy me. The above is not a comprehensive list of all the pros of Vista, just the things that make me say ‘hmm, that’s nice.’

Driver support has so far been quite good. The only problems I had were with my notebook’s built in camera and the 3.5mm sound jack not working, but a quick visit to the HP site to download different drivers fixed both problems.

To start with, the Nokia N73, despite its top-heavy look, feels great in the hand. It is well weighted, and its size makes it easy to get a firm grasp on. It is on the large end of the size scale, but is not so big as to prove awkward – and considering its features, it is not an unreasonable size at all.

The first thing you will notice about the Nokia N73 is its large, high resolution (QVGA, 240×320 pixels) screen. This has to be one of the N73′s star features; it is bright, clear, and the only thing that I would say can match it is the N73′s Nseries cousin, the N80. With that said, the N73′s screen is still larger, and in my opinion, better to use.

Arguably second to the screen, the N73′s other draw card will be its camera. The camera looks great on paper: a 3.2 megapixel resolution and Carl Zeiss auto-focus lens put it on the same level as the video-centric N93, as well as the N73′s rival, the Sony Ericsson K800. I can’t comment too much on the camera due to lack of testing, but expect some sample photos and notes to be posted here in the next couple of days. What I will say though, it is seems the camera application has a little trouble when it comes to the preview before taking a shot. The viewfinder gives everything a bad blue tinge, which then disappears after taking the shot. The offshoot of this is the fact that it is hard to toy with white balance pre-photo, but at least the tinge doesn’t come out in the final image.

The keypad featured in the Nokia N73 will be its weakness for a lot of people. While I don’t have a problem with it personally, the numerical keypad is rather small. To offset this, the keys have a good sized ridge on them, and provide a great level of tactile feedback. On the positive side, the N73′s joystick is one of the best I’ve ever used. It is firm, and really feels like it will last the distance, unlike many other phone joysticks that feel like they will break after a period of use.

One, albeit small, thing that I’m happy to see has returned to a handset is the small blue indicator light on the front of the device. This light blinks periodically after the display has gone to sleep to show that the handset is turned on, saving you from activating the screen. The only pick I can make on this light is that I would prefer that it either changed color, or blinked in a different fashion when you have a missed call or new message.

On the software side of things, it is all standard Nokia S60 smartphone fare. The Quickoffice suite is pre-installed, allowing you to view and edit Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files. The Adobe Reader application is also here, as are the usual fair of PIM applications, plus Nokia’s Lifeblog software. The speed of the S60 v3 UI is greatly improved over v2, and the N73 is one of the faster S60 devices I have used of late. The handset includes a ’3D Ringtone’ application, which utilizes the handset’s stereo speakers to make 3D effects, such as ZigZag and Circular, when you receive a call. These speakers also have the effect of making ringtones extremely, almost ear piercingly, loud when you use an MP3 as a tone.

One thing that I have noticed, which could possibly be remedied with a firmware update, is occasionally the signal meter will fluctuate from full to almost nothing several times, even with the phone completely stationary. Curious indeed.

Overall, the Nokia N73 marks one of the best, if not the best, S60 smartphone I have ever used. Good speed, a great camera, and great design make it a must have in my opinion. If you are looking for a solid smartphone with an awesome screen, I can honestly recommend the Nokia N73.

First things first, the Nokia E61 feels nice in the hand. I have used Blackberry devices in the past, and this thing blows them away in every way. The E61 is thin, and relatively light for a device of its calibre, and overall it gives an impression of a device smaller than what it actually is. Before this morning’s delivery, I had only briefly played with the E61 at trade shows, and I was a little concerned about one-handed usage. I am pleased to say that I have no problem using the device one handed, and am able to reach all keys with ease with my moderately sized hands.

One thing that surprised me was the feel of the keys when pressed. The look of the device seems to indicate a very firm feel, which is quite far from the truth. In use, the keys have quite a spongy feel that does take a little time to get used to. After a little use though, the keys feel nice, and my typing speed is slowly getting faster.

The memory card slot is in a bit of an awkward place, located beneath the battery cover at the side of the handset. Thankfully, the miniSD card is hot swappable, and you don’t have to remove the battery to get to it.

When first turning on the device, the screen will really daunt you. It is large, bright, colourful, and of a high resolution. This is great stuff, and one of the best screens I have seen on a smartphone in a while. The screen is particularly useful when using the built in Web Browser, which I will get to later.

To the untrained eye, there are few differences between the S60 v2 interface as seen on previous Nokia smartphones and this v3 version. One thing that is very noticeable however, is the speed of operation. This is easily the fastest S60 smartphone that I have ever used, beating even the much-loved 6630.

The software bundle with the E61 is impressive. All the regulars are here, including the calendar, to-do, notes, and contact management applications. These are all similar to the old S60 v2 apps, and work great, so I won’t get into it too much. What I will mention though, is the exceptional handling of office formats. Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and even Zip files are all handled natively, and all give results very similar to their desktop equivalents. Two applications that stand out from the pack are the Web Browser and WorldMate.

I’m sure anyone reading this blog has seen the features of the S60 v3 Web Browser. This great app handles regular web sites on the internet with ease, and navigation is aided with the Mini Map feature – which gives a thumbnail view of the whole page. The joystick can be used as a mouse pointer in this application, which further aids navigation.

The WorldMate application allows you too specify what city you are currently in, and give you information such as the local weather forecast, currency exchange rates, and full world time information. The information is updated over any of the phones data connections, and the E61 comes with a three-year subscription to the service. Excellent for frequent travellers

The WiFi connectivity was easy to set up, and I was surfing and getting email over a WEP encrypted 802.11g connection in no time. The Nokia E61 supports WEP, WPA, and WPA2 encryption. IMAP, POP, and SMTP work a treat over WiFi, though I have not had a chance to test the device with a push email service.

Overall, I am really happy with the E61 so far. It does have its share of ‘early firmware’ quirks. An interesting bug that I have noticed is that the forward slash and question mark keys on the keypad have been switched on my unit, meaning that when I want to input a slash, I have to press the question mark, and vice versa. This proved quite confusing for a start. At the end of the day though, this is a handset that I may stick with for more than the two weeks I average with phones these days.

Let me clarify that statement by splitting the handset into two areas: the phone itself, and the firmware it is running. The phone I like, the firmware is another story.

The phone itself is something that I am very happy with. The Nokia 6280 has a feeling to it that I like. It is weighted perfectly, making it easy to hold in one hand both open and closed. The body part of the device (the part with the keypad, not the screen) is covered in a rubber-feeling texture, which aids in grip and just plain feels nice. This material can also be found on the Motorola PEBL.

The keypad, though a little small, is one of the best I have ever used – it has great tactile response, and has the same rubber finish as the body of the handset. I could be a little biased about the size of the keypad, coming from using an N90 for the last couple of months, which is positively huge, though overall I love it.

The Nokia 6280′s screen is not the best in its class, but is clear and bright. Unlike many TFT LCD screens, it is quite readable in sunlight. Its QVGA resolution makes text crisp, but I was a little disappointed with the color reproduction – especially since it is capable of showing 262,000 colors.

This brings me to the software. The Nokia 6280 is one of the first handsets from the Finnish giant to run the S40 version 3 operating system, and after a few days use it is obvious to me that the new version needs quite a lot of work. I have found numerous major bugs in the software – it is inconceivable to me how this was ever released at all.

Two major bugs that are making the handset almost impossible for me to use are both related to lock-ups. My 6280 is completely incapable of viewing pages using the built-in WAP browser. The browser launches, but as soon as one enters an address to navigate to, the handset shows a plain white screen and restarts. The second bug occurs when the user receives an SMS text message while talking on the phone, something that happens to me quite regularly – the call drops, the phone locks up, and all that can be heard is a loud buzzing from the earpiece.

My 6280 is running the latest unbranded firmware version (3.60), and it simply seems to me that this handset was not tested before release – simply unacceptable. I have verified that these, and other bugs that my handset does not exhibit, exist in other handsets running both the 3.40 ’3′ branded firmware, and the 3.60 Vodafone version.

Were it not for the firmware, this is a handset I could love. I will keep my eyes peeled for a new version and have my 6280 flashed as soon as it becomes available, but for now I must caution interested consumers to hold off on a purchase until the bugs have been worked out of the firmware.