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.

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.

If there was a complaint to be levied against the E71′s design, it’d have to be the keyboard; the rows were straight across rather than being curved upwards like most well-regarded portrait QWERTY handsets (BlackBerrys, for instance), and the keys — while well-contoured — didn’t have quite enough “click” to them. The E73 adds a hint of curve, but the key design and feel remain the same. We’re not huge on portrait QWERTY keyboards in general, admittedly — but whereas we’d be able to get proficient on a BlackBerry Bold within a minute of picking it up, we never stopped regularly making typos on the E73. It wasn’t disastrous enough to break the deal, but we do think Nokia could’ve made some minor changes here that would’ve helped immensely.

Similarly, the navigation keys above the keyboard are a little weird (albeit for different reasons). This is actually an area where the Mode has taken a small step backward from the E71, because the shortcut keys for Home, Calendar, Address Book, and Mail are no longer delineated. Instead, they share the same piece of plastic as the soft keys and the Send / End buttons, giving the functions far less positive feel than we’d like — especially since they’re mushy, to boot. The center is dominated by the d-pad, a four-way rocking ring with an optical pad in the middle. It seems Nokia got a little too ambitious here with the spec sheet; they should’ve picked a rocker or an optical pad, not both, because we found the pad uncomfortable to “swipe” when it’s surrounded by a raised ring. It’s not a huge problem — we just turned off the optical pad and used the ring the same way you would on an E71 — but we would’ve been fine with a properly-designed optical pad alone, too.

[via:Engadget]

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