Nokia N78 Smartphone

At about the size of a skinny Sony-Ericsson S700, and looking like an SE 710a without chrome, the Nokia N78 exemplifies how far mobile technology has come in the years between the two devices. Here are some of the breakthroughs: 3.5G download speeds, 3G upload, WiFi connection, 3.2 megapixel autofocus camera, 70 megabytes of internal memory can be matched with up to 8 gigabytes of hotswappable microSDHC storage, n-gage gaming, Internet radio, and S60. It's not perfect, but it is very satisfying to use in many ways. Being from Nokia it is first and foremost a stellar performer as a mobile telephone.

As usual I will focus first on the positive:

» Symbian OS. This is what makes smart phones smart.
» 2.4 inch LCD. Big and bright
» High capacity battery, 1200 mAh battery lasts a good while
» micro USB connector moves the spring connector to the cable from the port in the phone so the wear is moved to the easily replaced cable
» 8 GB capacity Class 4 microSDHC hot-swappable storage is supported
» Music player supports album art and most audio formats
» Internal GPS; A-GPS, external GPS via Bluetooth connection
» auto focus camera, 3.2 megapixel resolution, Zeiss lens.
» owner's guides are thorough and easy to understand
» 802.11b/g works well with my home wireless network

All of this is in a package that fits well in the hand and certainly in a shirt pocket. It's not small like the Nokia 6300i is small but it isn't unwieldy like an iPhone.

The not so good

» no dust cover over the microUSB connector or charge port
» navigation key is difficult to control, even when "NaviWheel" mode is off.
» included third-party software is buggy.
» No native VoIP client included. No VoIP = No UMA.

I've been using the phone for four months, and I've grown quite at ease with it. It does a lot but I'm still hunting for things in the menus.

The camera takes excellent photos, video is good, the audio excellent. Zooming is smooth.

The music player is easy to operate. Play list based, there is no steep learning curve to get it to do what you need to do.

GPS is straight forward. Turn on the location devices you want to use, internal, external, and/or network and wait a few minutes. The first fix took several minutes. So long I thought it was not working. After that it performed much better. It is tightly integrated with Nokia Maps. New devices come with free trial voice navigation. It works well but sometimes gets confused requesting "make a U-turn" when none is called for.

One of the things Nokia has gotten right on past phones, less expensive phones, was port covers. It missed the boat by omitting it on this device.

The included home media server, now replaced by OVI media server, is buggy. Ignore it and download the OVI suite instead.

It is a ritual with Nokia to release several firmware changes, I hesitate to call them upgrades, after releasing a device. If your device is working, don't bother with the newer firmware. My experience with the N78 has been I lost the ability to play Internet radio via my home sound system through the FM receiver when I upgraded from version 10 to version 12. Now version 20 is out and no one has reported if this feature has been restored. For more information on this visit Forum Nokia at the Nokia family of web sites.

Overall I am pleased with the three N78 I've owned. I've put more hours on them than most phones I use, they bring the talker out of me.