Nokia N73 3G Cameraphone - Orange

Well got my new phone today, tearing myself kicking and screaming from the Windows Smartphone experience - I have been *very* happily using the classic SPV C500 (IMHO the best phone *ever* made) for the last 3 years, but the bills have been the wrong side of £40 for most of that time and it was, I thought, time to ditch the contract and go "pay as you go" (not being made of money)...so I got on the phone on Tuesday night to Orange, told them I was pissed off with paying so much and could they cancel everything and send me a new (cheap) SIM Card.

By the end of the conversation (at least half of which was contract negotiation by Flyingpops who had been through the process a few months back) my bill was down to £15, a new handset was in the post, and my benefits included infinite free text messages and stupid amounts of free cross-network minutes...I told them my only real concern was that the device must contain Carl Zeiss optics and the Nokia N73 was mentioned, sweetended with the offer of a free 2Gb SD card, I did a quick Google (as you do) and the spec looked good - 3G, built in radio (a first for a phone of mine), 3.2 megapixel camera (with the CZ optics I coveted), and the game that comes shipped on the handset was "Tomb Raider Anniversary"...(bit of a shock!)...

Anyway, as I said, the camera bit was the most important to me, so I charged the phone up this morning (they shipped it next day delivery on Wednesday, and sent me regular updates by text to tell me where it was, meaning I got to the post room to collect it just after they had signed on the dotted line) and it's quite an impressive camera on board actually, 3.2 megapixel (which is plenty), it even has a rudimentary flash (which seems to work up to about 2 feet away, no optical zoom (well, what do you expect), but it's got a macro mode good to 10cm, burst shooting (a bit on the slow side, but functional), and the image quality is pleasingly good giving nice warm colours (the C500 always balanced a bit on the grey/blue side) and the amount of noise is extremely low -



- only complaint, it doesn't seem to ship with a wrist strap, and when I popped into Jessops the only one they had was £4.99 (rip off)...sure I've got one laying around at home somewhere... ;)

Now I'm sat here listening to Classic FM through my headphones (one of only 4 radio stations I seem to be able to pick up from the 20th floor of Canary Wharf) feeling quite smug... ;) Well, I would be feeling "smugger" if I had managed to register my SIM, but when I called Orange they said their server was down...bah... ;)