Nokia N73 Guide

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Playing with the Nokia N73, a Series 60v3 device extraordinaire!

Tips

One of the first things to do is to change the standby shortcuts to something you want instead of something your service provider wants. In my case, I changed the right soft key mapping from ‘Miworld Mobile’ to ‘Contacts’.

Some operators have a non-obtrusive text logo showing on the display of phones they sell. But M1 decided to add an obtrusive and ugly graphical logo that sticks out like a diseased dog in a french prize-poodle show. Got rid of it using Nologo and these friendly instructions.

Organize your menu. Get rid of things you’d never use, like all the value-added junk your service provider thoughtfully installed, by moving them to a new folder (I called mine unused) at the end of the display list.

Strangely enough, my N73 came with two web browsers installed. The old, clunky crap is labelled Services and is accessible from the top level menu while the new, trendy, usable KHTML/Webkit based OSS browser is hidden in the Applications folder as Web. As a card carrying member of the church of KDE, I couldn’t stand this! Off goes Services to unused land.

Get Autolock now. Thank me (and Petteri Muilu) later.

Although the N73’s built in Flickr integration is decent, it isn’t for me since I can’t set tags or description before uploading pictures. Plus, it loses EXIF info if I resize pics before uploading. So I got myself a Shozu. Update: I’ve had problems with the Shozu daemons locking the miniSD card preventing me from using the phone as a USB device or from ejecting the card. So out goes Shozu.

Some key codes that work on the N73 (and maybe most S60v3 phones):

If you press & hold Applications key, a minimal task manager will popup - just like pressing Alt+Tab in Windows, etc. You can scroll through the currently running apps list using the joystick or the Apps key itself, select to switch to the highlighted app or hit C to kill the highlighted app.

The Call key can be used to quickly share objects such as pictures, files, etc. Try this trick in File Manager, Gallery, etc.

The App Mgr is probably the slowest application on the phone. A slightly faster way of uninstalling apps is to just highlight an app in the menu & then hit C. The C key can be used similarly to delete messages, delete files, etc. As with the Call trick above, this works in many applications.

In the calendar:

If it’s dark, your phone is locked and you can’t even locate the keys to unlock it, don’t panic! Just press the power key once to turn on the light!

The power key is useful in other ways too. Press it once to bring up a menu of profiles. Press it again to scroll through the menu!

From Standby, long press 1 to dial Voicemail, long press 0 to bring up Services, long press # to switch between General & Silent profiles and finally, long press any other number to activate speed dial. Also from Standby, long press the right soft key to launch voice dial.

In the Applications menu display (where you see app/folder icons laid out in a grid), instead of using the joystick to scroll to the desired app, you can just press a key from the keypad which corresponds to the desired grid location. For example, pressing 3 will launch the icon in the first row, last column.

You can now update the Flash Lite 1.1 player on your phone to version 2.1. Just follow these instructions. Since the new Flash Lite 2.1 is more or less compatible with Flash 7, a lot more Flash content available on the web should now be playable on your phone! Just save the .swf files you download from the web in the Others folder on the memory card and the Flash Lite launcher app will pick them up.

In any text-editing context, long press # to switch between alphabetic and numeric input.

After some time, you may find that T9 predictive text keeps suggesting some stupid word that you misspelled that one time! Although you can’t delete unwanted words selectively from the dictionary, what you can do is delete the entire dictionary and restore T9 prediction to its default state. To do this, just use a file manager like Y-Browser (see below) and delete the C:\Predic folder. You may have to reboot your phone after deleting the folder.

Themes

Apps

Games

Links

Bugs

If an SMS contains a date in the mm/dd/yyyy or dd/mm/yyyy format, the date gets highlighted but doesn’t get any context sensitive options. It would be nice to be able to create a calendar entry or todo item directly from that date.

☙