The Nokia N73 can be considered to be a substantially upgraded version of the Nokia N70, and it can be considered as a direct competitor to the Sony Ericsson K790i and K800i handsets. Most people will see the N73 as 3G phone with tri-band GSM, although we understand that there will be a quad-band GSM version with EDGE available for some markets too.

There’s a large 2.4″ 240×320 pixel display, a 3.2 megapixel main camera with Carl Zeiss optics (and the 3G version will have a secondary video calling camera). The Nokia N73 also has stereo speakers, an FM radio, Bluetooth and expandable memory using miniSD cards (to supplement the 42Mb of internal memory supplied as standard).

The software is the usual comprehensive Nseries package running on top of a Symbian S60 3rd edition operating system, including a multimedia player, web browser and email client. Nokia are pitching the N73 as a media device, in addition to being a camera phone, 3G phone and by the looks of it a pretty decent business handset. Also, pictures taken on the N73 can be uploaded to Flickr directly from the phone.

It’s slightly smaller and lighter than the N70, at 110×49x19mm and 116 grams. Talktime has been improved to 4 hours (from 3.5) and the N73 has a maximum of 15 days standby time (up from 10). There are three colour schemes - silver grey/deep plum, frost white/mocha brown and frost white/metallic red.

On the downside, the N73 doesn’t appear to support stereo Bluetooth and the keypad appears to have a similar cramped layout to the N70. Overall though, this is a very promising looking handset that is one of the best specified mainstream handsets we’ve seen to date, and it will probably be the biggest seller in the new Nseries range.

Nokia say that the N73 should be available from July 2006, although pricing has not been disclosed.

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