Nokia N77: an N70 Successor

Author: Syed Naveed Hussain

Nokia Nseries, the family of most classical and finest multimedia phones available in the market today, the reason for the success is the complexity & class of the series itself.

The Nseries started off with the first wave which included the Nokia N70, N71 and N91 4-gb edition. N70 being simplest and most comprehensive of the three marked its position as a mega-hit product by its “Slide ‘n’ Shoot Simplicity”. N71 being a bulky clamshell couldn’t make it and N91 4-gb had other flaws.

Since N70 was the first wave phone of Nseries, even though after the launch of its Music Edition, The users carrying the so called motive of “Slide ‘n’ Shoot Simplicity” just wanted something more than a black glossy housing and a 1-gb memory card.

So, the company launched N77, not being a member of the Music Edition, this phone comes with a sexy black housing. The texture of the phone is rather better than N70 Music Edition, it has the Symbian Version 3 operating system which makes it more visually flexible and user friendly. The basic theme in the phone is similar to the one installed in The Nokia N95.

Moving further, Nokia N70 was just a multimedia computer but this phone is more than that. It has a built in DVB-H based Mobile TV receiver with an internal antenna(470 - 750 MHz), you can have one touch access to Live-TV on a 2.4” Active TFT QVGA (320 x 240 pixels) display with Wide Viewing Angle. There’s a dedicated TV application for selection, purchase and consumption of TV programs.

The TV application has the feature of replaying upto 30-seconds, so you just can’t miss a moment of your favorite TV show. The DVB-H receiver supports Video/Audio codecs H.246 AVC 384 kbps @ QVGA 15 fps/ QCIF 30 fps & AAC upto 128 kbps. You can organize 50 channels (TV and Radio) in your favorite order. According to the manufacturer, the viewing time of TV cannot be more than 5 hours (on a fully charged battery).

The phone has a visual radio, similar to the one assembled in Nokia N70. You might be curious to know about the dimensions of the this device, well you would be surprised to know that it weighs 114 grams and has a dimensions of 111 x 50 x 18.8 mm. As the phone has Symbian Operating System Version 3 the phone is quiet much graphical with visual sliding menus.

The gallery of the phone is similar rotating one as like in N70. The gallery is more flexible with easy management, organization and transfer of photos, images, video clips, sound clips and songs. The phone has video and still image editor. There are dedicated media keys for TV, camera and volume keys are used for zooming in the camera view-finder. The media keys make the usage more rapid and easy.

The phone has an Ambient Light Detector for optimizing display brightness, camera auto-exposure and power consumption. Now, coming to the imaging capabilities of N77, there’s a slight disappointment as far as the camera of the phone is concerned, because it’s the similar one assembled in Nokia N70. Nokia N77 has a 2.0 megapixel camera (Nokia Optics).

The focal length is 4.8 mm, and has capability of zooming upto 16x (including the extended zoom option). The N77 has capability of video calling; the manufacturer has provided a CIF Censor Camera (352 x 288 pixels) on the front of the phone. The camera is good with complex shooting modes. The phone has video capabilities that included video calling, video recording and playback with streaming. The option of playing in fullscreen in RealOne Player is also available. Supported Video formats are MPEG-4, 3GPP, Real Video 8/9/10.

Nokia N77 has a better looking music player than N70, which is optimized for music listening in 3D with enhanced playlists. The basic communication features like text an multimedia messaging are there, the phone works in Dual-mode (GSM & WCDMA), the phone has Integrated Bluetooth wireless technology (1.2) for sending and receiving images, video clips, graphics, and business cards.

Bluetooth wireless technology is enhanced with A2D profile support for compatible stereo headset with Bluetooth wireless technology. The phone has USB 2.0 via Pop-Port™ interface and mass storage class support to support drag and drop functionality. Moreover, it has Local synchronization of contacts and calendar to a compatible PC using compatible connection, Remote over-the-air synchronization.

N77 has Java™ MIDP 2.0, CLDC 1.1 (Connected Limited Device Configuration (J2ME), the capability of Over-the-air download of Java-based applications and games is provided by manufacturer. The phone has a Nokia Web browser with Mini Map; it has WAP 2.0, XHTML, XHTML MP, HTML 4.01, CSS, ECMAScript and JavaScript.

The browser has Full Web compatibility with support for popular markup languages, scripting languages, and style sheets. Support for forms, tables, frames and image maps. File upload over HTTP using standard HTML forms is rather a complex feature and its there. Moreover the browser being a complex one has search and find capabilities, adaptive history list, Bookmarks database, Web Feeds (RSS), OMA DRM 1.0 - including forward lock for content protection, combined delivery and separate delivery.

It concluded that The Nokia N77 is a phone with all complex and professional features which might satisfy the user completely.