Can Nokia N78 3G replace the trusted N73 or N82?

Nokia recently launched the N78 smartphone aimed as an alternative to the already available successor of the N73, the N82. There has been a lot of confusion when it came to naming the true successor of the N73 ever since the announcement of the N78.

A successor to any aging and existing model has to perform better and offer more features. November 2007 saw the launch of the N82 which proved itself worthy as an N73 successor albeit at a slightly higher price.

Nokia has positioned the N78 in a similar way when the N73 took off in late 2006. Question is, does the N78 really have what it takes to replace the N73?

Under the hood, we have a 369Mhz Texas Instruments OMAP ARM11 processor with 96 MB of RAM running on an updated S60 3rd edition Symbian OS (rel 3.2) and with 76MB of usable storage ROM. This results in performance on par with the N82 when running resource hungry apps. Preinstalled along with the OS is the new Feature Pack 2, which is a first for an S60 smartphone. Visual enhancements such as extra GUI menu animations and customisable active stand-by screen layouts not only present an enormous amount of eye-candy but are also a treat, creating favourite applications shortcuts for easier navigation. You can customise menus with four view modes:

Standard mode 1

tandard mode 2

-Shaped mode

orseshoe mode

FP2 adds a new feature called Geo-Tracking which allows you to add geographical co-ordinates to photos. Overall, FP2 improves visuals and provides more fluid animations while ensuring performance does not take a hit. There are 4 preinstalled themes available:

Nseries 1

series 2

series 3

aze

You have the usual option of downloading and installing even more. Customisation is the highlight of all the recently released Nseries models. It even has a built-in speaker and an independent voice recognition system that can recognise a large bevy of user commands.