Nokia N78 review: Bitter sweet

Superb phonebook

True to its Symbian nature, Nokia N78 has an excellent phonebook with virtually unlimited capabilities. There is storage place for practically unlimited number of contacts and fields, with all the available memory potentially usable for the purpose. Contacts can be freely ordered by first or last name and can naturally be searched by gradual typing of any of the names.

The Symbian phonebook is remarkable

Editing a contact offers a great variety of preset fields and you can replicate each of them as many times as you like. You can also create new fields if you happen to be able to think of one. We personally find it quite a challenge to think of something Nokia has missed here. Personal ringtones and videos are also available for assigning. If you prefer you may group your contacts and give each group a specific ringtone.

There is a great variety of fields available when editing a contact

The Call log application, although not exactly a part of the phonebook, is also one of Nokia N78's strengths. It holds up to 20 call records in each of the tabs for outgoing, received and missed calls. These are all accessed by pressing the Call key on the homescreen.

If you enter the Log application from the main menu, you'll see a detailed list of all your network communications for the past 30 days. These include messages, calls and data transfers. The period can be shortened to save some space but you are quite unlikely to do that, as even with a huge number of calls the log only takes a few miserly kilobytes of memory space.

Messaging gets the same keypad treatment

Nokia N78 redefines heavy texter. With a keypad like this, stress is on heavy, big time. However, the software part of messaging partly makes up for that so, if you send a message every now and then - there is still some hope.

The Nokia N78 supports all common message types - SMS, MMS and email. The SMS and MMS share an editor. It is the well known intuitive application from previous Symbian S60 smartphones. It has a counter of characters left to the limit of 160. There is also an indicator in brackets showing the number of separate parts the message will be divided into for sending.

SMS editor

It goes without saying that a delivery report can be activated. The reports pop up on the standby screen and are subsequently saved in a separate folder in the messaging sub-menu. When you are exiting the message editor without having sent the message, the editor prompts saving it to the Drafts folder or discarding it.

All it takes to convert a common SMS into an MMS is insert some multimedia content. A nice feature allows resizing pictures automatically for sending via MMS.

"...Nokia N78 redefines heavy texter. With a keypad like this, stress is on heavy, big time. However, the software part of messaging partly makes up for that so, if you send a message every now and then - there is still some hope..."

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Nokia N78 also features the dedicated audio message editor. Even if technically a type of MMS, the audio messages must have seemed important enough to people at Nokia to have its own separate editor. You can either record the message on the spot or use a previously recorded sound clip.

The dedicated audio message editor

The email client is also very similar to what previous Symbian powered phones have offered. It can download headers only, as well as the whole messages. There is also support for attachments, so Nokia N78 can meet almost any requirement regarding the user emailing needs.

The email client is really nice