So I bought the camera on ebay, after reading this in-depth review, for about $480 after shipping. The fun thing was that the shipping was direct from Hong Kong. I tracked it on FedEx, and on Thursday morning it was in Hong Kong. On Friday at 11am PST, it was in my hands. That's incredible if you think about it.

The Nokia N73 is a Symbian OS phone. It has a bunch of features (web access, Opera browser, javascript and flash compatible, mp3 & mpeg4 player, MS Office app & PDF reader, etc.), and I spent about 3 hours playing with it while reading the manual.

The camera does not disappoint. This cactus picture was taken with it today.

I did notice that the camera application can hang - it's hung twice in 3 days of heavy use.

I took the phone into the Cingular store so they could transfer my contacts over, and I could sign up for an unlimited data plan - which was $20/month more on top of my current bill. I also had to pick up a 3G SIM card.

One annoying thing is that the phone didn't have the standard Nokia lock/unlock keypad. By default you have to lightly press the power button and then choose lock. However, surfing the forums at http://europe.nokia.com I found this download that gives you the keypad locking.

The phone works well, I've downloaded gmail and google maps from mobile.google.com. I've set it up to automatically upload photos to Flickr, and I've spent hours surfing the web on the phone.

Part of the reason to get the phone was inspiration - to finally "get" the mobile app world. I want to build some websites that really work well with my mobile phone. E.g. I want to build a chat bot to get my web reporting easily via my phone. Or at least some RSS feeds that have the data I need.

In summary, the phone is really cool. The pictures are great. I'm glad to have access to the web on my mobile, and the process of buying a foreign model phone thru the internet wasn't so bad at all.

¶ 11/19/2006