Nokia E90

Filed under: Nokia Review — admin @ 12:23 AM

The E90, the latest Nokia communicator, is the first such device to run with the same S60 user interface that Nokia uses on the rest of its smartphones, now that the Series 80 and Series 90 user interfaces have been laid to rest.
The E90 is a very interesting handset from both a design and capability standpoint, and one that should be of interest to any mobile road warrior.
The Nokia E90 is a monster of a smartphone. It weighs in at a massive 214g (7.5oz), and measures up at a pocket stretching 133.5mm x 57.5mm x 20.5mm (5.3″ x 2.3″ x .8″) in size. It can fit in the pocket of a pair of slacks, but can be a bit uncomfortable when placed in a pocket of something tighter fitting, like a pair of jeans. The overall build quality of the device seems rock solid, but that is part of what makes it so large and heavy.
The exterior of the E90 looks much like the prior 9000 series communicator devices from Nokia. There is an external display, color, of course, and a full alphanumeric keypad that is augmented by an array of softkeys and a d-pad. The 16 million color, QVGA resolution display is sufficiently large and bright, which makes it very readable, and the keypad keys and d-pad offer very nice tactile feedback
A miniUSB port for data is located on the bottom of the E90, as are the power and 2.5mm headset sockets. The smooth back of the handset is where the auto-focus 3.2 megapixel camera and flash are located, above the removable battery cover. Just below the battery cover is an extremely well built microSD memory card slot cover.

The two large polished metal hinges along the left side of the E90 are what allows it to be opened up like a laptop computer. The E90 can be opened up perfectly flat, like a laptop, with the two halves of the device meeting at nearly a 90 degree angle, or anywhere in between.

The display’s massive 800×352 pixel resolution makes it ideal for spreadsheets and Word documents, but not exactly perfect for web browsing

On the plus side, though, the keyboard is laid out nearly exactly like a regular PC keyboard, and offers large enter and backspace/delete keys. It has 5 rows of keys, meaning that no special shift keys are required for accessing numbers, and the punctuation keys are exactly where you expect them to be

A blue Chr key is available for accessing some extra functions, such as changing the display brightness or enabling/disabling the Bluetooth system.

The Nokia E90 is a quad-band GSM/EDGE and 2100MHz UMTS handset. In terms of reception, the E90 is only an average performer, and the phone appears to be very sensitive to hand position. When opened up for use with the QWERTY keyboard, the user’s right hand covers the phone’s internal antenna, which can cause some connectivity problems

For practical reasons, the speakerphone is automatically activated when the E90 is opened up for QWERTY use. The E90’s battery managed a solid 8.3 hours of talk time in our tests, and is rated for up to 14 days of standby time.

Like all Nokia S60 based smartphones, the E90 has a very robust contact management system that can store most any piece of data one would expect to find in an application like Microsoft Outlook. Contact searching is simple, matching on both first and last names at the same time. Contacts, as well as calendar appointments, notes, bookmarks, and tasks, can be synchronized with a PC by using the included PC Suite software.

The built-in speaker independent voice dialing application works well, too, and is backed up by a speed dial system that can be accessed by long-pressing a keypad key, or by using the visual speed dial application.

The E90 has wide support for messaging and email. Nokia makes a number of push email clients, including BlackBerry Connect, available for E90 users

In addition to UMTS and EDGE wireless data, the E90 also supports WiFi connectivity. While the E90 never had a problem finding or connecting to a WiFi source

In spite of Nokia’s E90 having an obvious business focus, it has a very solid array of multimedia abilities and plenty of other practical functions that make it an all around handy device to have as a companion. To start with, the E90’s 3.2 megapixel camera takes some very nice photos as long as there is reasonable lighting. It has a good auto-focus system and a flash that is passable in dark situations. In general the automatic white balance function works well, and color noise is kept pretty low in all but very dark situations.

The S60 music player is also very usable. It isn’t as nice as the iPhone music player or even the Walkman player that Sony Ericsson offers, but it does a good job of organizing music. Music can be synchronized to the E90 using Nokia’s own free software or any MTP compatible PC application, like Windows Media Player. The music player supports the creation of playlists on the E90 itself, and also offers an equalizer function and full background music play that integrates with the E90’s active standby screen. Music can be enjoyed in mono using the E90’s built-in speaker, or can be heard in stereo with either a wired headset or A2DP compatible Bluetooth headset (a wired headset is included in the box). Additionally, the E90 also sports a FM radio, which requires a wired headset to be used.
Another major feature of the E90 is its built-in GPS module and the accompanying Nokia Maps application.
The application can use the GPS to find your current location and then plot a course with turn by turn directions to your destination of choice. The maps application has a decently large point of interest database and keeps its storage footprint low by downloading maps in real time over the air.

Like all recent Nokia smartphones, the E90 sports the amazing S60 browser, one of the best mobile browsers available today. The S60 browser handles regular websites easily, unlike many mobile browsers. This means that you can use the E90 to surf the same sites in the same way that you would on a desktop computer. The super wide screen requires a lot of up and down scrolling, but even complex CSS and Javascript websites will render perfectly on the E90.

The E90 ships with a decent array of office and organizer type applications. The QuickOffice suite lets E90 owners create and edit Microsoft Word and Excel docs, as well as text files. QuickOffice can also be used to view Power Point presentations.

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.

Leave a Reply