NOKIA E90 Review

[vX.DreDge]

Review: NOKIA E90 Communicator
By:Shahid "vX.Dredge" Aziz

There is more to it that meets the eye.

The Trends are changing, slowly but surely the Mobiles are starting to look more like computers than just mobiles. there was a time when talking to your friends on the go was the only purpose that was associated to mobiles, but with the passage of time the term mobile has transformed to smartphones.

when it comes to smartphones companies like Nokia, SonyEricsson, and a lot others are trying their very best to accommodate the best of the features into their mobiles, and thus pushing the technology even further to a point where mobiles are not just mobiles but they are Office on the GO and the Nokia E90 Communicator stands on top of them all.

At first sight the only thing about this set that comes into mind is THIS IS GOING TO BE EXPENSIVE, it sure is expensive, but does the price tag has anything to do with the unbelievable features that this set packs, read on to learn,

MILES AHEAD OF COMPETITION

if you have followed the mobile market, there has always been a BUZZ about PDA's and other phones that makes them different and SMART from the lot, imate, HTC and many others have accelerated at a high pace and have come up with incredible designs and functionalities, thus changing the way how people communicate with each other, and yet somehow none of them have been able to tackle the communicator series of NOKIA, if i am not wrong there is not a single phone that even comes close to this pocket super computer, though there are a lot of similar designs by other companies.

THE "S 500" IN MOBILES

The communicator series is now 10 years old and you can definitely tell that Communicator has matured just by looking at it. If you have this super mobile in your hand, trust me, you are bound to get noticed. It’s only the Nokia communicator Mobile that exhibits a class of its own, and E90 being the latest, not only meets the set standards in class, it also surpasses them by a great margin.

I give you the S500

FULL FEATURES

I give you the S500

UNBOXING

The E90 comes with a decent box with its picture and its name all over it, you simply cannot ignore it when you are window shopping,

inside the box the first thing that you are going to see is the phone itself covered in a nice plastic cover. Along with the Driver DVD for PC, that contains the NOKIA PC suite software.

Under the phone and driver DVD, you will find a ton of manual for the communicator.
One very interesting thing that i noticed was the URDU manual as well, which is really neat.

The Accessories
- charger
- hands Free
- PC Connecting cable.
- 512MB Micro SD card, with SD adapter.

Beauty meets Perfection

This definitely is the most beautiful set i have come across in a very long time. I have always been in favor of light sets that don’t bother you much. But this definitely is an exception, this Phone (super computer) is so exciting and beautiful, that you cannot ignore it in any chance.

Nothing comes Close

Nothing at all

Weighing at a 210g, this set is a bit heavy to your pocket, but when you have this sort of set, why on earth you need to keep it in your pocket. The Size of the mobile is almost perfect, i personally couldn't have hoped for a better size to weight ratio. The Old communicator sets had an issue of their hinges, they use to get loose with the passage of time, but in E90's case, its totally different this time, they are really solid and big, which means there is slightly any chance that they will loose any time soon, or may by never.

Really solid hinges for extra protection

you would find the Silver frame covering the front screen and the front keypad, which looks so very professional and stylish, Nokia did went a step ahead this time and they made sure they don’t let anything slip their eyes. One thing that i noticed is reasonably BIG front screen (240x320 pixels, 16 million colors), i still remember the 9300 and 9300i they had the most basic of screens providing a relatively small area to work on, but here you are going to find the screen big enough for almost everything. The body and built of the device is extremely stylish and solid, you are not going to find any forced Plastic this time.

Silver frame adds beauty

The Power button is placed at the top right corner of the silver frame;

3.2mega pixel camera comes with the phone, which is located at the back of the phone. It comes with LED flash as well. I was extremely impressed with the quality of the Pictures that it took, it almost felt like a 5 mega pixel camera image. The camera can be configured to HIGH and very HIGH image quality, heaving a HUGE SD card inside, this would hardly bother you. Along with the camera itself you would find two speakers as well, to me it was really amazing how multimedia this phone was, through it’s meant for business class yet it packs almost everything that another multimedia player can tackle.

Apart from the camera, there is not much at the back, because almost all of the space is now covered with a huge 1500 mAh BP-4L battery, one thing that irritated me was the way you have to open the lid to the battery, i really had to struggle hard to press the small button inside to slide the lid open.

On the inside the Sim location is rite at the bottom. no worries about that. At the bottom, apart from the connectors you are going to find a MicroSD memory card slot (with hotswap support) protected with a spring-loaded cover. At the bottom you can find the mini USB slot, a charger connector and the audio connector.

Hotswap for MicroSD card

let’s just cut the chase short and move inside and see the very reason it is called communicator.

Beautiful, just beautiful. You simply cannot ask for more than this. Just a mere look at it and you already know that this mobile is destined to own every mobile out there, and i mean every mobile.

Lies inside is the huge 4" screen (800x352), this will most certainly bring a smile at your face, this is really fantastic because you always require a lot of space for web browsing and document management and this is exactly why this screen is wider as compared to other PDA's, one really very important thing i noticed about this screen is its tremendous display, Extremely smooth and not chunky like PDA that strike your head if you gaze at them for long, but in this case, it is just amazing to see such clarity here.

The Screen has two stops for convenience, one at almost 90 degree and the other is complete flat position making it lie on the floor, but you can always adjust it according to your needs and satisfaction.

On the left side of the screen, you would find the accept and reject buttons for calls, loud speaker automatically turns on when you are on the communicator side of the phone. VGA camera is also located towards the right side for conference calling. On the left side of the screen, you would find the buttons that change their functionality according to the program that you are running, but commonly it is OPTIONS and BACK.

The QWERTY keyboard that lies just under the inner screen is the most interesting part in the Communicator itself, its keys are well placed and are big enough to work easily on them, not like the keys of the old communicator where you always had the feeling that the keys are going to come out any time now, not this time mates.
A really fancy thing about this keyboard is its light system, you can turn the light on and off just by pressing the button that has a bulb in it.

The best Communicator keyboard till date

THE BRAINS

you would probably be guessing if this mobile is fast enough or not, well to me it was perhaps the fastest business set, no hick ups what so ever, application switching is more fun now, even if you torture it to its max, it would still respond quickly, Reason? simple enough, powered by TI OMAP2420 processor (ARM11 architecture) running at 330 MHz and RAM at 128 MB, this super mobile is going to take you away from your PC for sure, I think its only a matter of time when you would be playing hardcore games not on your hefty computers but on your mobiles.

THE SOFTWARE

The E90 runs on the S60 3.1 (3rd Edition Feature Pack 1) platform running on top of Symbian OS 9.2.
So why did Nokia changed gear from series 80 platform to this, its simple, first to tell us that NOKIA isn’t sleeping when it comes to the software and second the S60 features some fundamental changes that totally dominates any older generation OS, some of which are tighter security and better system stability and better utilization of resources, and so on.

everything is as simple as it can be, you would find everything relevant to you here.
If you have been using the previous versions of communicator and any other mobile operating system for that matter, then there is not a problem for you to handle the communicator itself. Every thing is very well elaborated and detailed, you just can't get lost here.

Going through the software on the internal screen has been a fun for me; i had the freedom to change everything i wanted to. i could easily create new folders, with any name i could choose to (except the names that are already there); i could easily move any application to any of the created folders at ease, no problem there at all.

By default there are four themes installed in the communicator but you can always download additional themes and animations to fit your creativity

If you are using any current application at the background the system is intelligent enough that it would tell you by indicating a blue circle on the relavent folder that something is running in there, so you can head straight towards it.

OFFICE ON THE GO

E90 comes with a bundle of features that truly makes it a business class phone, equipped with Quick Office software in ROM (version 3.8); it really helps you to create documents that are highly compatible with Microsoft Office documents, so you don’t need to carry heavy laptops with you just to do some office work.

MULTIMEDIA

How does a fully business phone caters the capabilities that are directed towards a different kind of market, yes i am talking about multimedia functionalities, well, E90 was just as good as any other multimedia cell phone that is out there, i was really impresed by the sound quality that it produced.

There is a preinstalled player that runs almost anything that you throw at it, but still if there is something that it cant run, you always have the itnernet to download the apropriate software and configure it according to your needs.

Running mp3

CAMERA

The Camera on the E90 is a 3.2 Megapixel CMOS with LED flash and autofocus. the max resolution with which it can take pictures is 2048x1536. Here i would like to mention that i was a bit disappointed with the camera button that comes with the E90, one most annoying thing that i noticed was its lack of recognizing if the button is pressed or not, i had to press the button a couple of times to make the camera autofocus.

Also, i had to retake pictures a couple of times to be satisfied by the desired results, thats because of the fact that the camera almost instantly takes the picture when the button is pressed, instead it should autofocus first and than take the picture.

Here are some of the pictures that i took with the camera of E90.

There quality is not reduced only the size is reduced so that you can have a better idea how good the camera is.

WEB BROWSING

This is the part where i enjoyed and loved E90 even more, i virtually didn’t had any issues with configuring the communicator to the wireless LAN, it automatically scanned the enviournment and showed me that, it has found the network, and i was online in a jiffy, no hustle there, this is fantastic, you will not feel even the slightest of different when you are browsing through E90 or through your PC, the safari based web browser renders each site almost perfectly thus leaving hardly any room for you to argue. I personally loved browsing through the communicator.

THIRD PARTY APPLICATIONS, NOT A PROBLEM

Installing third party software is not an issue at all, just download or receive the application and you are good to go, no compatibility issues whatsoever, if you are a hardcore mobile user than you would definitely require third party softwares to be installed and work properly on your communicator.

CONCLUSION

There you have it, i am only going to say it once, if you can afford it, BUY IT, after reviewing E90, there is not a single bit of doubt in my mind that this is it, there is no competition whatsoever. This cell phone owns the business class, being right there on top, it has all the features that you can possibly think of, thus catering both the Elite business class and cell phone enthusiasts as well.

There is only one question mark that it faces, is it for every one? i have my reservations on it, if you are a heavy internet user and requires instant connectivity, this is definitely going to attract you for sure, if you are looking for a cell phone just to dominate your friends, then perhaps this would be an ultimate overkill.

The only drawback i can possibly think of is it's hefty price, humming nicely around 46000 - 48000 PKR or US $750 - 850, this definitely is going to make most of you think over it again, the last and perhaps the most annoying drawback that i noticed was its camera button, it simply will not listen to you and would do what it feels best.

In the end, all i can say is E90 convincingly meets the standards set by communicator like of series, it has all the style, professionalism and functionality that you can expect from it, all it require is you to get it.

Being overwhelmed by the style and functionality of the set, the team at WCCFTECH awards this cell phone our WCCFTECH Editors Choice award.

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