The Nokia N78 packs Wi-Fi and 3G networking into a bland-looking shell. So why was this phone ultimately a winner?
Review summary of the Nokia N78:
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 The Nokia N78 is one of the best N-series devices we've tested to date, and it's a great phone all around. For music and Web browsing, it's snappy and easy to use, with powerful features that won't let you down. The camera and messaging apps (or lack thereof) are disappointing, but not a deal breaker if you're more of a media fan. The hardest part will be convincing buyers this phone is worth $500, but we have no problem recommending it to folks who hate contract agreements or love a good phone at any price. Nokia, take note: This phone with a SureType keyboard and some down-home, Americanized applications would be a killer device. Release: June 2008. Price: $500.
Pros: Scroll wheel makes navigating the phone quick and easy. Great Web browser. Top-notch music experience, with FM transmitter. Slick, fast phone.
Cons: GPS couldn't find us in Manhattan. Images from camera weren't great. No IM clients. Design is ugly.
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Full review of the Nokia N78:
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The Nokia N78 is available as an unlocked phone from Nokia and associated retailers. It works on AT&T's 3G HSDPA networks, though some features, like videoconferencing with the front-facing camera, won't work on U.S. networks. The phone is available unlocked for about $500. It doesn't require a contract agreement, but it also doesn't benefit from a carrier subsidy.
Design - Good
The Nokia N78 is a standard-looking candybar phone. It's a nearly featureless black slab while asleep, and when it wakes up buttons illuminate the face in a standard 12-key layout, with some added buttons down the side of the bar. The keypad was too small for our tastes, but we did most of our work on the phone with the Navi-wheel. The four-way button in the center of the phone is also touch sensitive, so it acts as a scroll wheel, and we found it to be very responsive and useful in getting around the S60 interface.
The standard Symbian S60 UI hasn't seen much of an improvement for the Nokia N78, but it does have a few little fade-ins and visual flourishes that we appreciated. Overall, the phone felt very responsive. The usual Symbian problems apply, so when apps stacked up the phone ran slower, but it was easy to close apps running in the background using the dedicated Application key. Nokia has again experimented with a media browser window, accessible by the silver media key near the scroll wheel. We found the media window to be very responsive to scrolling and quick browsing, but it did not add more functionality than a standard shortcuts menu, as most features required a jump into the application to work.
Calling - Very good
We tested the smartphone on AT&T's HSDPA network in Lower Manhattan, and calls sounded pretty good. We got some background noise on both ends of the call, but voices sounded clean overall. The phone also reported good reception at nearly full strength for our entire test period. Battery life was pretty good for an HSDPA phone. We got about 4.5 hours out of a single call, which is a bit more than Nokia's suggested four hours.
For calling features, the Nokia PC Suite did a fine job synchronizing contacts from our Outlook address book. We wish the phone did more live searching, from the dialing screen and messaging app, but finding contacts from our list was always quick and painless. Conference calling was easy enough, with a little bit of menu digging. Voice recognition is a problem, though. The voice dialing software never recognized a single name we uttered. Even simple phrases like "Call Home" went misrecognized, and the resulting answers were humorously off base. We haven't had this much trouble with voice recognition on a phone since the Nokia 5300, which might be indicative of a larger issue. Still, not everyone needs voice dialing, and the phone redeemed itself with a speakerphone that was much louder than average, almost abusively loud, which we like.
Messaging - Good
For messaging, the smartphone offered some surprises and some let downs. Of course, the phone supports SMS and a range of MMS options. E-mail was surprising easy, and we were delighted when the N78 asked if we wanted to set up Gmail for IMAP, which is our preference. Setup was fully automated, and worked very well. We even tried sending a 5MB video file from the phone through our Gmail account, and it worked the first time, quicker than we expected. Unfortunately, the Nokia N78 disappoints with instant messaging. The client app asks for server and browser information, which is not how we've ever set up our AIM or Gtalk accounts. We would have liked to see a nice variety of IM clients, but at least this is a Symbian S60 phone, so plenty of third-party apps should be available.
Typing on the smartphone's tiny, thin keys was not an easy feat. The phone did a fine job with T9 intuitive typing, but the keys were so cramped, we found ourselves staring at our fingers as we pecked. Perhaps an N-series phone with a full QWERTY keyboard is in order?
Multimedia - Very good
Though it lacks the advanced 3G services of a standard carrier phone, the Nokia N78 does a great job playing music and video. The music player is especially impressive. We wish Nokia had a better piece of transfer software, and the Nokia PC Suite now defaults to Windows Media for music synchronization, but all our tracks came through just fine, with album artwork in tact. Browsing our playlists was fun and easy with the scroll wheel. The navi-wheel was almost as responsive as an iPod scroll wheel, with the requisite acceleration as we moved our thumb faster around the center. We also appreciated all of the extra music player features, including equalizers, easy playlist creation and snazzy visualizers. Best of all, though, the Nokia N78 backs up the great music player with great hardware. The phone features a 3.5mm headphone jack to use any headphones you like. For drivers, there's also an FM transmitter on board to broadcast directly to your car radio. We had some trouble finding a good station in New York City for transmitting, but the phone performed as well as any FM transmitter we've tried.
Scheduling and productivity - Very good
The scheduling and productivity apps on the smartphone are a nice bonus feature of using a mature smartphone OS like Symbian S60. The phone gets a QuickOffice suite for viewing Office documents, and the calendar app did a nice job of synchronizing our appointments from our Outlook calendar. It won't take the place of a BlackBerry or Windows Mobile smartphone, but this phone is no slouch for viewing documents and keeping track of a calendar on the road.
Camera - Good
The Carl Zeiss optics on the Nokia N78 set it apart from most phone manufacturers, for whom the lens is an afterthought. Unfortunately, even with the impressive optics, the 3.2-megapixel sensor and the auto focus, the N78 produced images that were sub-par. Compared to other phones we've seen, these looked great, but compared to even the lowliest point-and-shoot camera, we found the images disappointing. Videos were even worse, even though the phone can record VGA-resolution videos. Under the best conditions, pictures were okay, and we liked the wealth of options for sending and uploading photos. We even found the scroll wheel to be useful in browsing our image gallery. We just didn't find any picture worth saving.
Web browsing - Very good
Nokia N-series devices have always included one of the best Web browsers on the phone market, but the Nokia N78 backs up this browser with powerful hardware, making for a silky smooth browsing experience. We weren't blown away by the page loading speeds, even over the HSDPA network, but pages still loaded much faster than they would have over an EDGE connection. But once pages were loaded, the browser handled them with aplomb. Layout was nearly flawless in every page we checked, and the browser scrolled through log pages quickly, using the app's mini map as a guide. Going back and forth through the browser history was also a cinch with the page snapshots that the browser keeps in memory. Again, typing on the keypad caused some initial headaches, but once we had all of our bookmarks loaded, we were very pleased with the experience.
Price and availability
The Nokia N78 is available now from Nokia and other online retailers for $500.
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