The Nokia N78 is a fun phone to use, and despite some annoyances it's likely to find fans in those looking for a feature-filled Apple alternative.
If there's one thing that Nokia does really well, it's candybar phones. Now that the competition is so much tougher, Nokia has decided the way to compete is to stack its mid-range phones with features.
Design
The N78 is a candybar phone with a piano-black face and a brown, "Zen garden" back. Build quality is fairly good, though not quite up to the standards of other N-series phones. The plastic backing feels particularly flimsy and isn't quite held in place securely enough for our liking. The "hinge" holding the press-button lock even broke after a few days use.
The screen itself is 240x320 pixels, but due to the glossy finish of the phone it can get quite grimy with fingerprints and facial grease.
Button construction and placement are one of Nokia's weaker points, however. Pick the phone up and you'll instantly notice the tiny, tiny number keys. Though the "5" is indented it may take a while to get used to using the point of your thumb to text. While the Call, Cancel and contextual menu buttons may look capacitive, all are actual keys.
The unmarked "Multimedia" key sits where you'd usually find the Cancel key, and while it may be in keeping with the N-series design, it does require an initial learning curve. We also dislike the location of the Menu button itself — it's stuck on the lower left-hand side and is awkward to operate when using your left hand.
Features
Directly competing with the iPhone, the N78 tries to make up for the lack of a touchscreen by adding some features the Apple product doesn't have. The most obvious is the FM transmitter, which enables you to listen to your music on a car radio.
Another feature we really like is the provision of a 3.5mm input. While the phone still comes with a hands-free attachment you no longer have to use it — unlike many other phones — in order to listen to music.
Like most Nokia phones released from hereon in, the N78 comes with GPS and photo geotagging. However, voice-assisted GPS doesn't come standard and you'll need to pay a subscription fee for that — we paid AU$10.50 for a week's use. We think this is pretty stingy on Nokia's part.
Other features include a 3.2MP camera with a Carl Zeiss lens and LED flash, 2GB of memory, and 802.11g networking. Talk time is rated at 4.5 hours with a maximum of 320 hours of standby.
Performance
Though the interface may pose some initial hurdles, this phone is actually a joy to use. The bounty of features is quite useful, and we're straining our brains quite hard to think of anything this phone is actually missing. Navigation is relatively simple, though the poorly placed Menu button makes it a little harder to get around. However, once in the Menu, most items are logically arranged. Using the D-pad like an iPod "click-wheel" is kinda fun, but not very useful due to its small size.
Call quality is as good as we've come to expect from the market leader — which is to say voices were crystal clear and we didn't experience any choppiness or dropouts.
Despite using power-sapping features such as the FM transmitter and occasional Wi-Fi, we found battery life to be very good at about five days. Keep Wi-Fi on all the time though and you'll find the phone will last about two days.
Unlike the iPhone, we found it difficult to connect to the internet using Wi-Fi. While the phone features a Wi-Fi shortcut on the main page, it doesn't let you connect — it seems to act as a "sniffer" instead. Despite appearances, the contextual "Start Web browsing" option doesn't connect to the chosen Web point, but will use the more expensive 3G connectivity instead.
While you could argue that music isn't the main focus of this phone, it's actually implemented better than on any of the Sony Walkman phones we've used. The "Multimedia" button takes you straight to your music library, and when you plug in a pair of headphones, the music sounds equal to an iPod nano.
The camera is decent, if nothing thrilling, and the lack of a Xenon flash — which Nokia's own 6220 Classic has — is telling in its grainy night shots. But at least daytime photos aren't as "digital-looking" as some other phones we've used.
While we applaud Nokia's use of non-proprietary interfaces — namely USB and 3.5mm audio — we were disappointed to find there is no USB charging. While the new charger is the smallest we've seen from the company, a lack of PC charging means you'll still need to remember to carry the pack with you.
Finally, the GPS feature with the additional voice-assistance is a handy feature, but we wouldn't want to use it in a car without it as trying to read from the small screen could lead to an accident. One other issue is that you can't input a new address unless you have access to the internet — which means either when you're at home or via connection to 3G. While the amount of data use is likely to be small, it's still a cost that stand-alone units don't incur.
Important: this comment is based only on the review above and NOT actual experience. However, it *appears* the reviewer is trying their best to like this product, rather than being straightforward in its review.
Although there are many positive points highlighted, there are also some fairly serious quality and usability issues, for example:
"The plastic backing feels particularly flimsy... The "hinge" holding the press-button lock even broke"
"Button construction and placement are one of Nokia's weaker points"
"The unmarked "Multimedia" key... does require an initial learning curve. We also dislike the location of the Menu button itself"
"... the poorly placed Menu button makes it a little harder to get around..."
"Using the D-pad like an iPod "click-wheel" is kinda fun, but not very useful due to its small size"
"Unlike the iPhone, we found it difficult to connect to the internet using Wi-Fi"
"Finally, the GPS feature with the additional voice-assistance is a handy feature, but we wouldn't want to use it in a car"
And after all that, I'm amazed how it somehow still manages to get a bottom line of "despite some annoyances it's likely to find fans in those looking for a feature-filled Apple alternative." (7.9/10)
There are curiously quite a number of comparisons to the iPhone, but I'm not sure why it was thought necessary.
There are quite a few other products available (and planned) that are more specifically aimed to counter the iPhone, with touch screens and superior usability - the N78 just doesn't seem to be one of them.