Three Days with a Phone

General Overview and first Impression

You can find the full specs and technical details of the phone in Forum Nokia. In general the N78 was positioned to replace the N73 and looks like the little fancy brother of the N82. It is based on Nokia’s S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 2 with a slightly redesigned stylish user interface.

In general the phone looks stylish and the build quality is very good. On the negative, I simply do not understand why Nokia insists on redesigning the keys every now and then. The keypad is simply terrible. First and foremost, it is simply inconvenient to dial with the keypad. Every line of keys is connected as one stripe, the keys are unpleasant to press and the numbers are completely invisible in daylight or when the background lighting is off. Only when you unlock the keys (with some guesswork since you don’t actually can see the soft keys) the background lighting lights up and you can see the numbers (again, in full daylight the numbers are not really visible).

Cool Features Added

The N78 includes two VERY cool features that I should highlight right away:

Navi wheel

The Navi Wheel allow scrolling around the menu items by moving the finger tips around the rim of the scroll key clockwise or counterclockwise. This is really nice and allows quick scrolling through picture, songs or menus. Nice.

FM Transmitter

The FM transmitter allows listening to audio files played on the device through any standard FM receiver. This is fantastic when driving a car. I used this feature couple of times and it is just great.

Just go to Menu -> Music -> FM Transmitter, set your frequency and Voila. Tune your FM radio to the same frequency and listen to your music from the phone on your FM radio. Fantastic. Please note that the back cover of the phone is actually the FM antenna for the transmitter.

Note: my phone suffered from major stability issues with the FM Transmitter when I tried to skip to the next track. The phone just froze and had to be rebooted.

Setting up my phone

In general, the phone’s settings are similar to previous versions of Nokia S60 phones. However Nokia changed the way APNs are defined.

Trying to define an APN manually I couldn’t find the Access Point menu in the phone’s settings. Instead I tried to define Access Point with the “Access Point Control” menu item which requested a PIN2 code just to find out that Nokia decided to call the APN settings “Destinations”. Hence, In order to define APN in Nokia N78 you have to go main Menu -> Tools -> Settings -> Connections -> Destinations. Here you can set up both GPRS/UMTS APNs and WiFi APNs.

Sending and Receiving Messages

Unlike previous versions of S60 based phones, it seems that Nokia decided to include a single composer for SMS and MMS messages. So when you want compose a new message you can select between composing a “Message”, email or Audio message.

When composing a message the phone automatically changes the message type when needed. Although I can understand the reasoning behind it, in practice I found it to be confusing and the few first times I tried sending SMS with a subject the messages were not delivered since the phone was not configured to send/receive MMS messages.

A simple solution for this problem will be to remove the CC and Subject fields from the message composer by selecting options -> Message header fields and unchecking both the CC and Subject fields. This way the message will remain a text message.

Camera and Pictures

The phone features a good 3.2MP camera with CarlZeiss optics which produces very good pictures. The flash is a Led Flash but I have to say that it is quite strong although not in par with its bigger brother - the N82.

You can find below few sample pics taken with the N78. I did not use any post processing other than resizing the photos and adding the gray border.

Web Browsing

The N78 uses Nokia’s superb S60 Safari based web browser - not too much I can say about this other then, as with other S60 devices, using standard web sites with the Nokia S60 devices is almost livable and way better than the browser that comes with the Windows Mobile phones, for example.

Stability Issues

Usually most phones are stable enough on daily usage. However, the N78 I tested suffered from few stability issues that I just couldn’t ignore:

Bluetooth Car Kit

Not sure why this happens but, when I connected the phone to my Bluetooth car kit I suffered from unacceptable rate of phone reboots when I disconnected a voice call from the handset. I do hope that this problem will be solved in the future firmware upgrades.

FM Transmitter

Every time (and I do mean every time) I tried to play music using the FM Transmitter, my phone just froze when I tried to skip to the next track. I had to take out the battery to restart the phone since nothing else worked.

This is very annoying given how great this feature could be if it just worked properly on my phone. I guess this can also be fixed in a firmware upgrade (I hope).

Summary and Conclusions

The Nokia N78 has a potential to be a great phone but few problems prevent it from actually being one. Problems like stability, annoying keypad and sometimes awkward behavior. I believe that all technical problems can be fixed in future firmware upgrades but for the time being they are just too annoying to dismiss…and the keypad, well - unfortunately this cannot be fixed in a firmware upgrade.

Final Verdict: 7

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