The glamourous of N78

After letting go my good servant SE K550i, I bought myself a N78. It was quite a dilemma to get a phone at the time. I don't fancy phone. Don't even think it is worth to spend so much on a phone because the market price of mobile phone will drop so crazily. No market value at all. It's a suprise for me when I spotted this glamour phone.

Here's how I'm happy with my new phone.

Design - Impressive

The Nokia N78 is a standard-looking candybar phone. It's a nearly featureless black slab while asleep, and when it wakes up buttons illuminate the face in a standard 12-key layout, with some added buttons down the side of the bar. The keypad is small which suits my small finger I have. Navi-wheel, the four-way button in the center of the phone is also touch sensitive, so it acts as a scroll wheel, and I found it not very responsive and useful in getting around the S60 interface.

The black glossy surface is bad more sweaty hand like me. It's finger print magnet. But I just love the design so much! One cool feature called breathing makes the navi wheel light fade on and off as if the device is breathing while in Power Saver mode so you can tell the phone is really breathing! When I have unread messages or miss call, the illuminate light shows it breaths quicker.

This is my 1st symbian phone but I heard it hasn't seen much of an improvement for the Nokia N78. Overall, the phone felt very responsive. The usual Symbian problems apply, so when apps stacked up I felt the phone ran slower, but it was easy to close apps running in the background using the dedicated Application key. Nokia has again experimented with a media browser window, accessible by the silver media key near the scroll wheel.

Calling - Very good

Very good. Especially the speaker phone. I girlfriend never know that I'm using the speaker while talking to her compared to my previous Sony Ericsson phone, she always sensed it if I use the speaker handsfree. The bundled earphone somehow let me down. The quality is good for music but it failed when it is being used for handsfree.

Messaging - Good

For messaging, the smartphone offered some surprises. Of course, the phone supports SMS and a range of MMS options. E-mail was surprising easy, and we were delighted when the N78 asked if we wanted to set up yahoomail, after I installed hotmail messenger, my hotmail was installed automatically into my message feature. Setup was fully automated, and worked very well.
The phone did a fine job with T9 intuitive typing, although some people which big thumb complain that the keppad was too cramped but for me it is not a problem at all.

Multimedia - Very good

Though it lacks the advanced 3G services for Digi, the Nokia N78 does a great job playing music and video. The music player is especially impressive. Browsing our playlists was fun and easy with the scroll wheel. The navi-wheel was almost as responsive as an iPod scroll wheel, with the requisite acceleration as I moved our thumb faster around the center. I also found some useful feature of the extra music player features, including equalizers, easy playlist creation and snazzy visualizers. Best of all, though, the Nokia N78 backs up the great music player with great hardware. The phone features a 3.5mm headphone jack to use any headphones you like. For drivers, there's also an FM transmitter on board to broadcast directly to your car radio. AWESOME!

Scheduling and productivity - Very good

The scheduling and productivity apps on the smartphone are a nice bonus feature of using a mature smartphone OS like Symbian S60. The phone gets a QuickOffice suite for viewing Office documents, and the calendar app did a nice job of synchronizing our appointments from our Outlook calendar. Somehow, it is not bundled originally and I have to installed it myself.

Camera - Good

The Carl Zeiss optics on the Nokia N78 set it apart from most phone manufacturers, for whom the lens is an afterthought. Unfortunately, even with the impressive optics, the 3.2-megapixel sensor and the auto focus, the N78 produced images that were sub-par. Compared to other phones I've seen, these looked great, but I don't really care as I'm a dslr user. Videos were even worse, even though the phone can record VGA-resolution videos. Under the best conditions, pictures were okay. I even found the scroll wheel to be useful in browsing image gallery.

Web browsing - Good

Nokia N-series devices have always included one of the best Web browsers on the phone market, but the Nokia N78 backs up this browser with powerful hardware, making for a silky smooth browsing experience. I wasn't blown away by the page loading speeds, even over the wlan. But once pages were loaded, the browser handled them with aplomb, huge megabytes. Layout was merely small, and the browser scrolled through log pages quickly, using the app's mini map as a guide. Going back and forth through the browser history was also a cinch with the page snapshots that the browser keeps in memory.

Built in GPS system - Very very good

The built in works like a charm. Although a GPS system on any mobile phone will never beat a ­standalone GPS system, I really like the GPS system on the N78 called Garmin Mobile XT. Some of you may doubt "Do I need to pay in order to use the gps?" I have the hacked version and it is totally free. The signal receive is from satelite, it doesn't have anything to do with the telco and nokia. The Malaysia maps are accurate and quite detailed in respect to landmarks and points of interest. I don’t even need to refer to the manual to operate it. I find it hard to search for the location I wanted to go but it is useful to search the place by criteria for example food & beverages ---> Asian/western/barbeque/and many choices, it will shows you the nearby restaurant and even coffee shop then the voice navigation will then guide you to your destination. It’s really useful to have a pocketable navigation system that you can use anytime.

Price and availability - Worth every penny

Guess what? It only cost me rm840 for this glamour baby!