What has actually been added on the Nokia N73 Music Edition, besides the color change to black, since the original N73 was a fairly complete package and already known for being something of a supreme camera phone. Now it’s camera AND music? Pretty tempting to the High Street people. The hardware had its limitations, in the tiny keypad and the camera which couldn’t handle very bright light conditions, and the hardware here’s identical. What’s different is the music software, a key assignment and the accessories shipped in the box.

The main changes for the Nokia N73 Music Edition are the welcome addition of a 2GB miniSD card (enough for around 30 CDs worth of music) and the superior AD-41 adapter/stereo headset. This has a standard 3.5mm stereo connector embedded in its control unit, meaning that you can plug in your own in-ear headset rather than having to stick with the slightly cheaper Nokia earbuds.

The key assignment pictured below is that of making the previous ‘Media’ key now go straight to Music player. This is a definite improvement.

The Music Edition firmware has as its centre piece a brand new version of Music player, complete with two Windows-style visualisations, Oscilloscope and Spectrum, full support for Album Art, plus optional ’stereo widening’ and ‘loudness’.

Rounding off the Music Edition are a couple of new themes, ‘Waveform’ and ‘Stave’. Again, ultimately more frills and frippery, but combined with the black case, ‘Waveform’ at least looks pretty darned cool and gives off the right sort of vibe.

And the 3.2 megapixels camera with great clarity, far less compression artefacts and better colour than even Nokia’s own flagship Nokia N93. The Nokia N73 Music Edition’s camera has the obligatory Carl Zeiss optics, a mechanical shutter and a good autofocus lens.

The Music Edition facelift is definitely worthwhile overall. It reinforces another core capability of modern smartphones in a fairly friendly and very cool way - and the fact that it does it to a device which was arguably near the top of a different class of phone - camera phones - means that Nokia has made this doubly attractive.

[Reviewed by Steve Litchfield from All About Symbian.com]

Here’s a quick review video of the Nokia N73 Music Edition.

Store & Price Comparison

Store	Offer Details	Price
	NOKIA N73 Unlocked Silver Grey & Deep Plum CellPhone In stock	Price: $289.99
	Brand New Unlocked Nokia N73 ME w/ 2GB Memory Card In Stock	Price: $369.95
	Nokia N73 ME Unlocked GSM Cell Phone In Stock	Price: $487.99
	N73 Camera Phone In Stock	Price: $296.99