Nokia E73 'Mode' coming to T-Mobile next month?
By Chris Ziegler 
posted May 19th 2010 2:26PM
posted May 19th 2010 2:26PM
[Thanks, Spenny]
posted May 19th 2010 2:26PM
A look back on popular stories from today in a specific year.
Now that we've thrown 'em off the trail, use the form below to get in touch with the people at Engadget. Please fill in all of the required fields because they're required.
Seems that Nokia is slowly but surely waking up for the US and A market.
Finally RIM will have a run for its money. E-Series+Nokia Messaging+Ovi Maps = WIN
I have a E72 and I luuuv it.
@Mr w00t
Agreed, I have had one for about a month now and i love it! tons of people slate it for not being a touchscreen, the UI not being all slick and Appl-y - but it has tons of brilliant apps (gravity, nimbuzz and joikuspot to name just a few) and the battery lasts days- yes, that's days plural!
@Mr w00t
I had an E72 and what got me most was the lack of conversation-style sms texting. Sure they had a beta version called "Conversions" or s'thing...but it was buggy.
THAT was my biggest issue with the E72. Otherwise, Great camera, great flash, decent QWERTY, built like a tank and 2 days of heavy use and still battery to spare.
@(Unverified) I had the same problem with my E72. I purchased ThreadSms Lite from the Ovi store and it solved that problem. It's good to see Symbian^3 supports threaded sms natively.
@Mr w00t Damn. The choices. The new Bold on Sprint or head back to T-Mo for the E. Yeah. The E72/73 line is probably the only phone family that give BlackBerry a real challenge in the business-oriented smartphone department.
@Mr w00t
This is a KILLER device. Build quality is truly fantastic. I would trade in my BB in a second.
@Mr w00t
shouldn't you really be saying the CARRIERS are finally waking up to Nokia and Symbian? Nokia didn't sell because carriers wouldn't sell them. Now they are, and Apple and Android have to finally fight on even ground in the US.
Don't call it a comeback. They've been here for years...
@christexaport Sorry, as you might have noticed I do not live in the US and A. You are probably right :)
@Mr w00t Yeah it really is about time Nokia stepped it up here. I feel weird with my N95 sometimes because no one realizes that Nokia has smart phones here it seems.
WiFi calling? Is that UMA? If it's, I might be interested.
Meh, not too impressed.
However, the more competitors there are in the market the better
@remmus2k I think that you never needed a phone like this thats why you are saying this... It is a great business phone (mail for exchange, office support, calendaring etc).
If this thing is anything like E72 and E61i, which I previsouly owned, this is built like a TANK. My other phones have sustained some "tortures" and functioned till the time I had to give it back to IT support for me to get the new model (the company I work for always gives the newest E-Series for its employees).
@Mr w00t
Blackberry > this for business, sry.
And I hate bb's :P
@DoctarPeppar
You are wrong, the E72, and most likely the E73, royally rape any Blackberry out there. I know, I have used Blackberries extensively, and they have nothing on these devices. Build quality alone, these are miles ahead. Also, BB does not have the business foothold in the rest of the world that it does in the US.
@DoctarPeppar
BB is better?? HOW?!
Let's see... It could be a personal vote on the UI, so its a PUSH.
Email and communications WAS a BB dominated deal, but Nokia also has Exchange support, PUSH email, Ovi Chat, built in VOIP/SIP client, and Microsoft Office Communicator, making it a formidable foe itself. From my experience, email is just a sliver of the expected functionality of a device. I call that a near push as well, but give RIM the slight edge, but not enough to make it a selling point over the competition unless that is the main purpose for using the device.
As for app framework support, RIM is woefully lacking, and in today's app crazed US market, that is important. RIM supports Java and...not much else. Symbian supports Java, Python, WRT, Qt, Ruby, Mscript, Flash, and more. No OS is competition for Symbian in this regard. Advantage Nokia.
I see that both of these devices have strong points, but the larger ecosystem, open system, and better developer support put the E73 over the top for me. I'm interested to know your stance, and why.
I'm moving to Boston from the UK soon and for a while it was between the HTC Incredible, iPhone 4G, and HTC Evo 4G. As a hardcore E71 fan; the E73 just joined the race...
@tacovsgrilledcheese
Been happy with Nokia e71 for so long but you realise that its a great keyboard with no good browsing experience. S60 browser sucks. Hoped always that Nokia developed the webkit browser and just never happened. I had all updates and even had e72 for week, same deal. Best first contract but moved on to nexus one.
Why do you not try Opera or another browser for S60?
@matknny
what firmware are you using? I'm willing to bet that the issue is the slower Flash content rendering, which can be turned off. But if one browser has Flash support and another doesn't, is it truly worse? Or does the addition of Flash just cause the slowdown. Remember, the E71 has low RAM for a Flash device, and the platform wasn't as optimized for it back then. It is a two year old device, for crying out loud.
I'm guessing this is just E72 with T-Mobile 3G?
@pika2000 Basically, hardware buttons moved around and AWS added to the bands. At least they spared us the removal of the front-facing cam.
Come guys, the "mystic" was released weeks ago, it's the nokia E5. You reported on it! http://www.engadget.com/2010/04/13/nokia-c3-c6-and-e5-try-to-smarten-up-the-dumbphone-market/
As for this E73, i'd take a guess that this isn't much different to the E72 in spec (or at least I hope not having just bought one!)
@Jamma
That's what I'm thinking.... what's the upgrade here to warrant a new release?
@Jamma Momentary lapse of reason, sorry! Wanted to get up the news on the double... moved just a little too fast.
@Chris Ziegler
Well I am happy you are covering Nokia much better lately. Thanks.
@JFH +1
@Jamma
They are not the same phone!
@JFH +1
Yawn
No.
Isn't E5 the Mystic? Then how's it rumored anymore?
@Abhi9
OK. You were quick to remove the last line which said: "-- and fortunately, it doesn't seem to look anything like the rumored "Mystic." "
Nice work :)
Is this the first Symbian device to be subsidized in the US? If so, what the hell took so long?
@TheGM
A series of bad business decisions on Nokia's part, namely the fact that they refused to strike deals with carriers for their smartphones, since some, like AT&T, wanted to alter features in the phones...
Nokia decided to sell phones unlocked, at full price, and in the consumer society of US, that just didn't work for the people. Americans rather be tied up in contracts and credits, just so they wouldn't pay a few more Franklins...
@kapanak Sad that the irony of that situation equates to the consumers paying more in the long run than with an unlocked phone. I believe people in the US would rather just embrace locked, subsidized but direct phones than unlocked ones.
@TheGM No it's not a first subsidized Symbian S60 phones in the US. There were the E62 (POS), E75, 6650 Fold, E71x, 6790 Surge, and 5230 Nuron.
@bachviet
The E75 was never offered carrier subsidized in the U.S.
@Johnny Tremaine Ooooooooops I had the models mixed up. It should be the N75 not E75.
@bachviet I don't remember any subsidized S60 phones at all. For what carrier where they available for?
@TheGM The E62, N75, 6650 Fold, E71x, and 6790 Surge were/are available through AT&T/Cingular.
The 5230 Nuron is available through T-Mobile.
@N900 I think U.S. consumers will embrace it as soon as we decide on one radio standard. In Europe, unlocked phones sell well because GSM is the standard. This isn't so in the U.S., where the cellphone industry is equally divided between CDMA/EVO and GSM/EDGE/HSPA.
Until either LTE or WiMax actually wins the day, there will always be this divide, dimming the attraction of unlocked phones. When all the carriers end up on one standard, you'll see unlocked phones gain favor (as well as the dominance of one OS a la Windows in the computer industry).
@kapanak said:
"A series of bad business decisions on Nokia's part, namely the fact that they refused to strike deals with carriers for their smartphones, since some, like AT&T, wanted to alter features in the phones..."
You may consider those bad decisions, but sticking up for the consumer is exactly why they still have a loyal following. They could've allowed the carriers to pimp them, and made large profits, but Nokia's main mission is to remain profitable, but while bringing connectivity and computing to the entire world, and not as the carriers see fit, but as the market and innovation see fit.
We are lucky today. We have two fully open multitasking OSes with fully accessible APIs for background apps, the widest developer toolkit support in the industry, a cross platform framework at the heart of its strategy, and you can do anything on a Symbian or MeeGo device that you can a laptop. It could be all iPhones and Android, but some of us want more, and only they provide it.
"Nokia decided to sell phones unlocked, at full price, and in the consumer society of US, that just didn't work for the people. Americans rather be tied up in contracts and credits, just so they wouldn't pay a few more Franklins..."
No, the carriers decided not to carry Nokia phones because of apps like Gnutella clients, Torrent clients, VOIP, app stores, vast multimedia support, built in navigation, etc. They wanted dumber devices, and Nokia knew its customers didn't need or want that. So they stuck to their guns, and made devices available for sale online. Google wasn't successful at it, but Nokia has been, relatively.
Because of the carriers, we have a stunted market, and are catching up to Europe. The iPhone would probably have a much better feature set had they had Symbian devices to compete with in the US. Now that they are here, Apple will be stepping its hardware and feature game up.
Americans really perfer the prepay route, according to stats. Just saying...
@kapanak
It may have been a bad business decision on Nokia's part, but it was a consistent decision overall, meaning they had their own mission statement that superceded "pure business" decision making.
This is one of the reasons why people stick with Nokia and why I respect them as a global company/brand even though I use a WinMo device. Their brand stands for their belief and they are willing to lose money over that belief. Everyone knows the US is brimming with consumer spending.
Nokia's belief and mission is to empower the world's citizens through technology. This is evidenced by their willingness to spend effort on localization and catering services specific to each market. And through their business decisions, they have come the closest to spreading technology on a global scale and continue to do so even when more "revolutionary" companies reject markets altogether for being "not enough profit can be made there".
So when Nokia decides they will lose a market to ensure that their brand and products carry their mission statement rather than be superceded by another directive that will impede that, I stand with Nokia, even as I don't use their device.
Maybe the E73 is to the E72 what the E62 was to the E61, but hopefully less crippled! It'll have AWS 3G of course...
The industrial design looks different from the E72. If it improves upon the awesome E72, it's going to be an excellent phone: http://tnkgrl.wordpress.com/2010/02/21/life-with-the-nokia-e72/
@tnkgrl
Nice review.
Beware RIM. Nokia is coming to your territory.
@cherryboom
You must be the dumbest person on here. This is a truly stellar device, direct descendant of the E71, which was the best phone of the year, over even the Iphone according to stuff magazine. Anywho, what is bothering you that makes you spread all this FUD all the time. Is life hard on you?
Front-facing camera still intact? T-Mobile might be getting soft on us.
I thought Nokia's new naming convention is single letter, single digit, followed by double digit iteration, like the E5-00.
And now there is a new E73? How does that fit it?
@tocharius This is probably a re-branding of the models before the single-digit models. Compare this model to the E72.