You know something is up when you receive a powerful smartphone and you don’t rip open the 
box to make a phone call or try out an Excel spreadsheet. Instead you slide open the camera lens cover and madly take photos of anything remotely attractive or interesting. That’s the Nokia N73: a camera that just happens to have a smartphone attached. If great photos aren’t your thing, Nokia offers a wide variety of Symbian OS Series 60 phones with with lesser cameras and other strong points such as the Nokia E61’s QWERTY keyboard and the N91’s 4 gig hard drive for MP3s aplenty. If quality photos are important, the N73 and its bulkier sibling the N93 (which lacks the 850MHz band used by Cingular in the US) are Nokia’s top offerings. The Nokia N80 has a 3MP camera that’s quite good (once you adjust to the shutter lag), and you’d likely be pretty impressed if you saw the photos it takes. That is, until you see the N73’s photos. The N73 has a 3.2 megapixel camera and adds a Carl Zeiss autofocus lens which makes for sharper photos.
The N73 is one of Nokia’s newest S60 3rd Edition phones and was released at the end of July 2006. It’s shipping in Asia and in parts of Europe but is not sold in the US by any carrier. However it is sold by importers unlocked for use with any GSM carrier. We picked up ours from phonesource-usa.com and received the Hong Kong version of the phone in two days. Should you pick up an Asian model, have no fear: it’s a bilingual phone so you can set it to English (unless you prefer Simplified Chinese). On the number pad, the numbers 1 through 5 each have one Chinese stroke, but these aren’t distracting. The phone does support predictive text in English as well. The Nokia is available in three color combinations: silver gray / deep plum (which we received), frost white / metallic red and frost white / mocha. The plum and mocha colors are complex, looking nearly dark gray to black with metallic highlights in darker locations but turning much more vibrant under direct light. Nokia N73 - Phone Reviews by Mobile Tech Review