Nokia E90 Communicator

Having recently reviewed the Nokia N810 internet tablet and discovered it is little more than an executive toy, I approached the E90 without any expectations. I'm glad to say that so far I have not found any unusual missing features. Yes unlike the N810 this device actually has a phone. And that's not all, there are even some productivity applications in the form of a simple word processor and spreadsheet.

From the outside the phone ...
...standard mini-USB so kudos to Nokia for a design that people may actually be able to use without spending another £20-30 on accessories. As if that wasn't enough there's a micro SD card slot right next to the USB port which means you can actually take the card out without removing the battery (well, you can if you have fingernails or tweezers as the card slot isn't spring loaded). Nokia even supply a 512mb card in the box with a micro-sd to standard-sd ... more

Having recently reviewed the Nokia N810 internet tablet and discovered it is little more than an executive toy, I approached the E90 without any expectations. I'm glad to say that so far I have not found any unusual missing features. Yes unlike the N810 this device actually has a phone. And that's not all, there are even some productivity applications in the form of a simple word processor and spreadsheet.

From the outside the phone appears to be rather large by modern standards, with a standard keypad and a function panel above it. There's a power switch at the top right. There are two buttons on the right side of the device, one activates the instant sound recorder function (and I suspect voice dialling as well), while the other is used to take pictures when in camera mode. Strangely this button doesn't automatically activate the camera mode in the same way that the top button activates the voice recorder function.

The device takes some getting used to as it does not have the most intuitive user interface despite being largely icon-driven. For instance to create a quick spreadsheet it is necessary to first specify where you will save the final file. You also have to name it before you get to do any editing. Then there's editing the cells. You first have to press the large square button on the keypad to enter any values. This is tedious and slows down any productivity and it would have been much more intuitive if it allowed you to enter values directly when the keypad buttons are pushed. Flip open the phone and it becomes a whole new device. A 3.5"x1.5" screen is wonderfully complemented by a micro-sized keyboard below it. This is no standard keyboard though. It has function keys including two which can be assigned as quick shortcuts for whichever of the E90s many features you use the most. There are so many features on this phone that you may find it difficult to choose what to assign them to. There's a built in music player and also a headphone socket.

This is great as the internal speaker is not the loudest and sounds quite tinny. There's also a standard mini-USB so kudos to Nokia for a design that people may actually be able to use without spending another £20-30 on accessories. As if that wasn't enough there's a micro SD card slot right next to the USB port which means you can actually take the card out without removing the battery (well, you can if you have fingernails or tweezers as the card slot isn't spring loaded). Nokia even supply a 512mb card in the box with a micro-sd to standard-sd card adapter. This is the holy grail of user friendly design as the device picks up the mp3's I drag onto it without problem. I notice there's already a filesystem on the card with a shedload of directories. This is the phones dumping ground for whatever you create on it so there are mp4 video clips, spreadsheets, documents and sound files all ready for easy transfer to your PC. There is something very satisfying about seeing a jpg image from a Nikon D80 being used as a wallpaper within seconds of a few button clicks and the fact that it can cope with compressed files from a 10 megapixel camera so easily is astounding.

As I continue to explore, the web option is my next obvious selection and it is easily accessed from one of the function keys at the top of the keyboard. At this point I hit a minor snag as the device stumbled to maintain a wi-fi connection to my home router due to the ssid not being transmitted. It is supposed to be able to cope with hidden stations but I found I had to change my router configuration to allow it to be seen by the Nokia. Once connected I changed it back and there were no more problems. Web surfing itself is not as simple as you might expect. It soon becomes apparent how much we take the mouse for granted as trying to do everything with the scroll button is fiddly and time-consuming. By far the bast thing to do is add websites that you visit frequently to your bookmarks. It was a real shame to follow the Nokia themes download link only to discover a lack of content but this phone is so customisable that it seems a trivial ommission. Then I discovered something that made me say "wow, that's good... I never expected that". It seems that the device was not just keeping a history of the pages I visited, but actually keeping the pages. By pressing the back option button I got a flashy side-scrolling history of all the pages I had visited and could click on the centre button to go back to that page. There's also a zoom option while browsing so you can view a page at 50%, 75%, 100% or 125% of it's actual pixel resolution size. While I wouldn't use this phone to do any critical surfing, I can see it being useful next time I'm in McD's if it can use their free wi-fi connectivity.

It's not all glowing praise for this device though. Strangely you have to close the case to use the camera and video camera functions. This is a minor niggle though and the 3.2 megapixel camera has a surprising degree of control over settings such as flash (yes it has a proper flash), white balance, exposure compensation, colour tone, contrast, sharpness and light sensitivity. There are a few other niggles though such as the SMS composer. From the desktop, pressing the button at the top right of the main screen provides a nifty shortcut to the composer. From there it's quick work to add the number you're sending a message to, but then what do you do? Pressing enter just adds a new line in the "to:" box and attempting to start your message results in an invalid contact name message when you try to send it. At this point the intuitive user interface grinds to a halt and I'm forced to RTFM. It turns out you have to press the scroll key down to move the cursor onto the blank lines which may be intuitive to some but wasn't for me. Still yet again this device delivers by giving a countdown of the number of characters available (160 for a standard message). According to the manual it will even split longer messages into multiple SMS sized chunks.

Yet another minor niggle is the startup time. When I power up my phone I want to talk right then, not have to wait for it to boot up. It's a phone, not a PC. Or is it? That's the thing about the E90. It tries to do so much with it's wi-fi, its bluetooth, its web-browsing, music player, video camera, PIM, calendar and GPS. The more I use it, the more I discover it can do and this is the one device I've reviewed so far which blurs the line between computer and phone. This is my uber-gadget, as it can do the jobs of other gadgets which I might carry around at times and it is more than adequate to most of those tasks. The camera will never be as good as my Nikon but it's more compact and doesn't require that I keep reading the manual every month or so. The GPS might not be as good as my Garmin Nuvi but this device is less conspicuous. Once folded up it could be mistaken for an old house-brick phone from a distance. In short, this device is so almost-perfect that it is the closest gadget I've yet found to perfection, but it's still not quite there. It's as though Nokia missed out an important test for this phone. Give it to people who don't know how to use it and then use their feedback to tweak the usability.

Is it worth the £350+ price tag though? That is a good question. There are alternatives as there seems to be a big market for these modern do-everything phones. I can see the point; but these feature packed phones make me think of hi-fi's, especially seperates systems. Is it better to have all the features together? It's certainly more portable but what happens when you can no longer get GPS map updates or replacement batteries? It's an expensive piece of kit to replace so I have to say I probably wouldn't buy one. Like the hi-fi seperates, you can get a better result by pick & mixing your ideal system. A cheap phone with an organiser, bluetooth keyboard, cheap GPS and video/stills camera could save you as much as half-the-price. Even smaller compromises like a phone from the Blackberry range could save you money or allow you to opt for a cheap hi-definition camera for about the same price. So there is the main problem in a nutshell. It's over-priced for the specification it provides. Even on Ebay these phones are still listed with buy-it-now prices of £250-£300. At £150 I would definitely get one of my own and be contented with all those little annoyances with the user interface. Until then I will have to be content with my Garmin Nuvi, my aging Motorola C385, my palm tungsten-E and the £50 digital video camera I got from Ebuyer. They still do their jobs and even if I need to buy a new gadget bag to carry them all, there's still a lot of change left over from £350.

Then again if I was offered this beauty as a free upgrade on my contract I would jump at the chance to own one. If only to tide me over until there is a genuine uber-gadget which ticks all of the boxes for me. At the moment I haven't found anything which comes closer but I am always looking.

Edit 31/7/08
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I've now had some time to get to grips with this gizmo and I have to say it's a bit hit & miss. I transferred my contacts from my sim card (or at least I thought I had) only to discover them missing the first time I tried to text my brother. Well at least now I'm sure I've done it right so we'll see if they vanish again. On the plus side, the micro-sd slot IS spring loaded, mine was just a bit stiff at first. On the down side though I have had trouble accessing excel spreadsheets on the device. Again this is the unintuitive user interface. My documents were in the right directory but did not appear in file manager. However after launching quickoffice you have to press right on the scroll button to get to quicksheet which lists the .xls files and seems to open them ok. The manual suggests office 2k/XP and 2003 documents are supported. Again the user interface is unintuitive and you have to use the options menu to access multiple worksheets. From the appearance of the first sheet though, it is not obvious if there are other worksheets present in the document. 

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