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	Nokia N78 black (O2) Carphone Warehouse £69.13
	Nokia N78 black (O2) Carphone Warehouse £45.00

RATING:

Pay Monthly

SUMMARY:

Quad-band Symbian OS 9.3 smartphone with 3G, HSDPA, A-GPS, WLAN, 3.2 megapixel camera, FM visual radio and 2.4-inch QVGA screen. microSDHC card slot supports 8 GB+ memory cards.

Nokia N78 Review

The Nokia N78 (launched Nay 2008) is a feature-packed good value N-series phone. 3G and HSDPA (fast Internet downloads), Wi-Fi, A-GPS with Nokia Maps, USB 2.0, microSDHC card support (Nokia say 8 GB, try 16 GB or 32 GB cards), and a decent 3.2 MP camera with LED flash.

Quibbles include the shiny black plastic front casing (fingerprints, and feels a little cheap), keypad design and navigation key placements.

Price-wise, August 2008, and the N78 costs £279 SIM free. You might want to consider the Nokia N82 - the N82 costs just £22 more SIM free (£297) and has a 5 MP camera, Xenon flash, TV-out (N78 does not have TV-out) and a different design.

Design

Glossy black plastic front with one of three colour back plates - lagoon blue, coca brown or pearl white. We're not fans of shiny black plastic phones - fingerprints and looks/feels cheap. Yes, subjective.

Build quality is fine.

Quick tour:

Top: Power button and 3.5 mm audio jack.

Bottom: Microphone and strap eyelet.

Left: Stereo speaker (bottom left, the other stereo speaker is top of right side), memory card slot (Nokia say "up to 8 GB", but will support 16 GB and higher cards), microUSB slot, power connector.

Right: Speaker, volume, camera button.

Back: 3.2 MP camera with LED flash. Patterned design. 3 colours available - lagoon blue, coca brown or pearl white. No camera lens cover.

Press the release to remove the back cover.

Front: CIF camera, ambient light sensor, 2.4-inch QVGA 16 million colour TFT screen. Good quality screen, wide 160 degree viewing angle. Keypad and navigation keys are.... interesting. The navi key can be used to scroll through lists.

Keypad - Interesting

Thin keys - each row is one bar. There is no separation between the thin keys in each row. It's different, and many people won't like it.

The end, call, menu and cancel keys - all are flat and positioned closely to the edge of the phone. The keypad keys aren't backlit (white) unless the keypad is active.

In The Box

Lots of goodies, including a 2 GB microUSB card.

Features

Symbian OS 9.3, S60 3rd Edition, Feature Pack 2

Download applications, document viewer, editor, organiser tools and more.

3.2 MP Camera

S60 camera interface, same as Nokia N82, N95 8 GB. Photo quality is fine. Not as good as the 5 MP phones, 8 MP phones and perhaps some other 3.2 MP camera (such as the Sony Ericsson camera phones). The LED flash isn't the best for low-light shots. There's photo and video geotagging - attach meta-data about where the photo/video was taken - uses the integrated GPS unit. Photo geotagging is now a standard feature in new GPS phones.

A-GPS and Nokia Maps

We Nokia Maps. They're free to download and give pretty good detail. If you want voice navigation you must pay a subscription fee. Otherwise, use the GPS, look at the Nokia Maps - download more maps from the Nokia Maps Web site and you have an excellent GPS device.

A 2.4-inch screen isn't as good as larger screen phones for viewing maps, but it does the job. Using assisted-GPS, get a satellite lock in under 30 seconds.

Web Browsing - Nokia Web Browser

The S60 Web browser is pretty good - our favourite along with Opera Mobile and Safari. It's not a touchscreen, there's no QWERTY keyboard and the screen is just 2.4-inches (bigger than average but much less than the big screen phones such as the Apple iPhone).

Entering text on the keypad isn't particularly fast. 3G and HSDPA do offer fast Internet download speeds. Lovely. You can also hook up to a local WLAN (Wi-Fi) - a home/office wireless network or a public Wi-Fi hotspots (found in hotels, airports, city centres and other locations).

Music and Video

Competent media players. The speakers are a little tinny (as are most, if not all mobile phone speakers) - use the provided headset. There's an impressive 24 hour music playback (offline) and 4.3 hours video playback. The music player supports MP3/AAC/AAC+/eAAC+/WMA. Video player: 30 fps playback, MPEG-4, H.264, H.263, Flash 3.0.

Listen to radio shows broadcasted over the Internet. Works well. Nokia Internet Radio is embedded in the latest S60 3rd Edition mobile phones. Browse stations by station name, genre, country or language.

The Nokia N78 also has FM radio and visual radio.

Battery Life

1200mAh battery - BL-6F. 4.3 hours GSM, 3.16 hours 3G. Not great. Standby time is 319 hours.

Summary

Feature-packed quad-band (dual-band WCDMA) 3G, HSDPA, Wi-Fi and GPS Symbian OS 9.3 phone. The N78 is a low-end N-Series phone (in terms of price). Keypad usability is subjective, as is the glossy black plastic attractiveness.

Price-wise, August 2008, and the N78 costs £279 SIM free. You might want to consider the Nokia N82 - the N82 costs just £22 more SIM free (£297) and has a 5 MP camera, Xenon flash, TV-out (N78 does not have TV-out) and a different design. We prefer the N82.

If you want a top-notch camera, check out the best camera phones.

TAGS: 3g, hsdpa, music, gps, wi-fi, smartphone, bar phones

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