When I signed up with Three I chose the N73. At the time I was excited - the reviews were largely positive and the sales assistant was gushing about the features on the phone, so it's safe to say I was looking forward to living with this bit of gadget wizardry. So after having it in my pocket for a few months now, how's it been? Well...

First things first. I do like this phone. It's grand for making calls, it looks good, and it does lots of stuff. But would I buy it again if I knew then what I know now? Well, no I wouldn't.

The problem with the N73 is that it's not very good at doing what it wants to do. Here's why:

• It's slow. R-e-a-l-l-y slow. Like, if you accidentally press the Gallery button and want to go back to the main screen it'll take a full ten seconds for the phone to process the Cancel instruction. Accessing any of the menus has a delay of up to 3 seconds. When you're typing a message your thumbs will have moved on to the next letter before the letter you were on even appears on the screen. And there's an unacceptable lag between pressing the shutter button and the photo actually taking. All in all this makes using the N73 a frustrating experience.
• The camera isn't all it's cracked up to be. Looking at the specs you'd think a 3.2Megapixel Carl Zeiss affair with a flash and auto-focus would be the berries. But sadly no, it's not. Unless you're in direct bright sunlight the image quality is very disappointing. Every shot has to be doctored in Photoshop cos of the mad amount of jpeg artifacting that's going on. Shadows are awful - full of blocky purples and browns. Images are dreadfully soft, so bad that even Photoshop's amazing sharpening tools can't rescue things. And, as I said earlier, it's maddeningly slow to react.
• Video is an absolute joke. One of the reasons I went for the N73 was it came with an onboard video editor that promised the ability to take and edit what Nokia whimsically call Moovees. Fact is though, is absolutely appallingly bad. Absolutely everything is dreadful - no picture quality at all, and sound that is indecipherable. It's astonishingly bad.
• The Operating System is infuriating. Basic things like being able to set a repeat alarm, or being able to delete all messages in a folder in one go, are inexplicably absent. And the onboard dictionary only seems to store about 20 of your own words - something that's rage-inducing when yer from Cork and wanna talk like dis like. The keypad too is difficult to use. Having to fold your thumb under itself in order to hit the delete button is a real annoyance. And the central joystick is inaccurate and 'clicky'...
• There's no Landscape view when browsing the Internet. Given that this function in itself is terribly p-o-n-d-e-r-o-u-s-l-y slow, but, limited to Portrait view only, is annoying too.

On the plus front, the games, while not N-Gage quality yet, are still fun and entertaining, the screen is actually big enough to watch Batman Begins on, the sound is very good from the music player, calls are clear, battery life is good and surprisingly, the camera takes really very good macro photos.

But would I get one again? Well, no. The annoyances are just too great. I should have gotten the 6120 which, with a smaller screen and only a 2Meg camera, is actually a much much better all-rounder, surpassing the N73 in terms of ease of use and photo quality.

I'll hang on to the N73 for a while though - I've no real choice. It cost a lot of cash so I'll use it til a proper, better phone becomes available - at a time when I have the money to buy it. The N96 now... that's a phone...

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