Some two years after its release, there are still plenty of people who'll swear up and down that the E71 is the finest phone Nokia has ever produced -- and for good reason.The Nokia E71 was an iconic phone that even as an unlocked and unsubsidized phone, sold well in the US. Late in its life, AT&T picked it up as the Nokia E71x where it enjoyed modest success though it was long in the tooth by then and a bit overrun with AT&T bloatware. T-Mobile customers, left out of the 3G love nonetheless bought the unlocked E71, especially early in its life when many T-Mobile smartphones still shipped with EDGE 2G data. The phone-loving world waited with great excitement when Nokia announced the E72, the successor to the E71 boasting improved specs and who knows what special sauce Nokia might throw in. By the time the phone made it to the US, again unlocked, in February 2010, it didn't add much to the once-proven E71 formula. It had a better camera, a significantly faster CPU and a slightly newer version of S60 software on top of Symbian OS and nothing new to rave about.
Four months later, T-Mobile US has picked up their version as the Nokia E73 Mode. While Nokia usually goes with a numeric appendage to indicate it's the same phone with different 3G bands (e.g.: Nokia E72-1, Nokia E72-3), this time they've created a new model number for the T-Mo version. The Nokia E73 is basically a Nokia E72 with T-Mobile 3G bands and carrier software (not much carrier software since T-Mobile doesn't muck up their phones with bloatware).
The good news is that you can get a very capable Nokia S60 QWERTY smartphone not too long after the US unlocked release for a very attractive $69.99 with contract. The bad news is that the E73, like the E72, doesn't bring any features to the table that will set the world on fire. The other good news is that the E73 Mode has stunning hardware: a metal back, very solid build, superb keyboard and an incredibly thin design. This is a very, very nice looking and feeling phone. No plastic BlackBerry Curve 8520 here, despite the low price. Kudos to Nokia for finding a way to sell high end hardware at such a competitive price.
The Nokia E73 Mode has a QVGA non-touchscreen display, an optical trackpad, 3G HSDPA, WiFi, a GPS, Bluetooth 2.0 +EDR, an SDHC microSD card slot and a 5 megapixel autofocus camera. It runs on a 600MHz ARM11 CPU with 128 megs of RAM (we'd like more RAM) and 512 megs of flash memory with 250 megs available.
The Nokia E73 Mode is so named because it allows you to create modes to match your lifestyle. This feature has been available on Nokia S60 phones for some time, but it's the first T-Mobile Nokia phone to offer it. With modes you can have a work and home mode with a specific set of home screen shortcuts, ringers and wallpaper. It's handy and unique to Nokia's phones. The E73 is a QWERTY messaging smorgasbord with Nokia's own IMAP/POP3 email client, SMS/MMS and T-Mobile's IM client that handles MSN Live Messenger, Yahoo, AIM, MySpace IM and Gtalk. You can download Nokia's Mail for Exchange client for MS Exchange support as well. The mail client handles HTML email well, but we found email a bit more trying to configure than on BlackBerry phones. Gmail email support is available and you can download Google's S60 sync software too.