Some two years after its release, there are still plenty of people who'll swear up and down that the
E71 is the finest phone Nokia has ever produced -- and for good reason. As a platform,
S60 was the product of a simpler time when the smartphone market was dominated not by touchscreens, but by numeric keypads, and the E71 was arguably the last of a string of bona fide successes that Nokia enjoyed in the platform's heyday alongside pioneering handsets like the
N82 and
N95. Thing is, the E71 was different than those other models in a very important way: it was elegant. Historically, Nokias have typically favored function over form and saved the highest-quality materials for the
Vertu line, but the E71 bucked that trend -- it was slim, sexy, chock-full of metal, and curved in all the right places. In fact, to this day, it remains one of the best-looking, best-feeling smartphones ever made.
Customers (and reviewers) made their love for the E71 clear, and Nokia sought to recapture the glory with the introduction of the refined, upgraded
E72. For Americans, of course, the biggest problem with the E72 was that you couldn't buy it from a carrier -- and unlike the E71, it never got much traction as an unlocked purchase. That's where the E73 Mode comes into play, a mildly reworked version of the E72 with T-Mobile branding and, of course, support for 3G on T-Mobile's AWS bands. Put bluntly, though, this is still just a warmed-over E71 -- and in 2010, is there a market for that? Let's have a look.
Having been nearly a year since we'd used an E71, we felt right at home the first time we wrapped our hand around the E73 -- it's obvious that Nokia put effort into preserving the magic that made the E71 such a great piece of hardware. For those of you who
haven't played with an E71, though, you don't know what that means -- so allow us to wax poetic for a bit. The E73 clocks in at just over 10 millimeters thick, but for some reason, it feels even thinner; that's probably a result of some creative curves along either side of the back, a trick similar to the E71's. The battery cover is a solid piece of metal that looks and feels great, though it has a tendency to smudge and oil up very, very easily, so you'll want to keep a lint-free cloth (or, you know, a shirt sleeve) handy for when you're trying to keep appearances.
The E73 also shares what might be its single most important trait with the E71: rock-solid construction. Nokias -- even modern devices like the N97 and N900 -- have a tendency toward the plastic end of the spectrum, and creaks, squeaks, and wobbles aren't out of the question (the N95 was particularly notorious for feeling a little cheap). That might all change with the
N8, but for now, the kind of monocoque shell employed by the E73 is still a bit of a rarity. It feels absolutely fantastic in the hand, perfectly weighted and contoured.
