T-Mobile announces the Nokia E73 Mode

And once again we have proof that where there’s a good amount of smoke, there’s likely to be fire. Today Nokia announced it will be bringing the E73 Mode, a Symbian S60 device said to offer a perfect balance between work-life and, uh, life-life, to T-Mobile. Best thought of as a E72 with a facelift, the Mode features not only a 2.4″ QVGA display, full-QWERTY keypad, 5 megapixel camera, Wi-Fi and 10.2Mbps HSDPA, but also free turn-by-turn navigation from Ovi Maps. The Nokia E73 Mode will be available from T-Mobile on June 16th for $69.99 on a 2-year contract.Read

Tags: 10.2Mbps, 5 megapixel, E73, GPS, Mode, Nokia, Ovi, Ovi Maps, Ovi Store, QVGA, QWERTY, Symbian, T-Mobile

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tim

I want one now!
Mack Simmons

I’ve got to say that phone looks sharp as a tack. If it were only sold on Sprint.
tim

I want one now! Miss my E71 and am growing tired of this 9700
mi_canuck

Not bad at all!! Go T-Mo!!
daEducator

Does it do UMA?
Does it have threaded messaging?

If the answer to those questions are yes, then I will seriously consider giving up my Sprint SERO with BIS…

On 2nd thoughts, maybe not yet.
Jarrett

I just don’t understand Nokia. They virtually have zero marketing in the US. Market this device a little bit and surely you could sell some units here in the US. The BlackBerry(ish) look of some of their offerings is troubling though. So for those of you who use a Nokia phone (I only ever used one Nokia phone and I couldn’t tell you the model, work supplied) What is the S60 variant of Symbian? Now many variants are there and how many Platforms is Nokia handling right now?

Thanks

Dara

S60 is what 50% of smartphones in the world are running.

This would be S60 v3, the non-touch version, and the touch version is v5. It looks like Nokia might just keep cranking them out as they are fully capable smartphones and their costs have probably been dropping for 5 years on these devices so they can sell them in lower income markets.

Symbian is transitioning to S^3 and then S^4. They bought Trolltech for Qt, and this will give them a common development platform across Symbian and Meego which is the all platform OS that they’re developing with Intel. This new generation of apps can also be compiled for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Meego will also be on their high end flagship phones by the end of the year while Symbian phones like the N8 will be marketed as more consumer friendly phones.

Unfortunately, Nokia has always been too far ahead of American carriers. They’re always making big announcements about the amazing services that they’ll be charging Americans for that have been enabled, for free and out of the box, on the device side of Nokias for years.

They simply don’t want to sell phones that could have obliterated their long distance revenues in 2007. Quite simply, they’d have to admit that they were either incompetent at providing a competitive service or just plain gouging their customers.

http://www.innopath.com Jason Lackey

Dara, unless my understanding of the history of Ovi is mistaken, Nokia was wanting to charge for those wonderful services. Now that things like Ovi Maps have the magical price of Free things are more interesting. While being able to change the Navigation voice to be a stony surfer dude is an interesting feature of Ovi Maps (as is the far more useful local storage of map data so it works w/o data service), I hope that someone in Espoo tries Google Navigation and uses it as a usability benchmark.

I hope that Meego (please change the name) and Symbian ^4 (Symbian 3 is looking like more of the same) are big steps forward. Last N900 I played with showed great promise but Android has come far since then. I also suspect that the iPhone HD will be resetting the bar, although Froyo has lifted it fairly high.

As for the E73, I hope it is better than the E72. I still think that the E71 was the pinnacle of Symbian as the relatively spartan interface was snappy and fast for most tasks while MfE still allowed unfettered access to corporate email. E72 seemed a step back from the elemental goodness of the E71, a case of incrementally more being less and not more.
Mark

Symbian^3 isn’t a big step forward but it’s a big enough step forward,

MacMan

I’m impressed it supports there fast 3G. Good job tmobile.
ty

from what i have read while working it has UMA or as it says wifi calling. Tmobile has responded to the lost of customers due to no signal at home by relaunching there wifi phones along with femtocell technology and repeaters in areas were coverage suffers. I had the e71 and wasnt impressed but the e73 looks like it will do well. as a rep the more phones the better. it gives the customer more choices.
ChunkyMonkeee

Is the front facing camera still intact? I would switch my 8900 for this in a heart-beat, if possible. What most don’t know is how much better Nokia smartphones are than BB and their crappy os.
tech junkie for life

I’m glad AT&T skipped on this and stuck with the E71, who needs new stuff!
http://www.innopath.com Jason Lackey

BTW one thing that I don’t see mentioned on the data sheet but which Nokia usually does a very good job with is FOTA – Firmware Over The Air. Always nice to be able to update the device OTA rather than have to deal with cables and downloads. Many other Nokia devices have supported this, including the E71x on AT&T. Hopefully this device ships with FOTA too.
Robert S.

Nokia makes some good phones but their OS seems so old now. So difficult to use compared to modern smartphone operating systems like iPhone and Android. I couldn’t go back to that anymore.
mosamjc

This would have been my dream phone…three years ago when s60v3 and qvga were acceptable standards. RIP Nokia, old friend. I’ll miss the simplicity and indestructibility of your hardware, but none of the fickleness of your software releases and firmware updates.
http://loveinccnu.com loveinccnu

Nice…
E72实在是太丑的，对于320×240这个分辨率下的S60系统已经没有任何期望了，仅仅希望Nokia能把外形不要做得那么丑。
vishnu

another gadget from Nokia. Going to rock again!
Angus188

I really hope it has UMA for T-M@Home (which works great) and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g DRAFT N.
Gil

Are we sure it has UMA and not VOIP?

T-Mobile announces the Nokia E73 Mode

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