Our Review of the Nokia E90
A solid-looking 3G smart phone with full Querty keyboard, the Nokia E90 provides you with a mobile office in your pocket, but you may find its bulkiness off-putting.
In terms of specs the Nokia E90 will beat most of its rivals hands-down, but weighing a whopping 210g it's a BIG phone. Targetted primarily at business users, the handset is designed to fit in a briefcase – don't even try to cram it into your jeans pocket.
At first glance the E90 looks like it's been transported straight from the eighties – all that functionality's got to fit in somewhere, and it certainly feels durable. But open it up and it turns into a mini-laptop, much like its predecessors, the even chunkier 9210i and 9500. As with previous Communicator handsets, the E90 boasts a generous 91 x 40 mm colour screen and full Querty keypad. With a resolution of 800 x 352 pixels and 16M colours, the TFT display is sharp and detailed, and displays emails, photos and Web pages with brilliant clarity. The keyboard is wide and well set out, meaning you can type long emails comfortably without getting cramp in your hands. The keys provide a good amount of tactile feedback. Located above the keypad are dedicated keys giving access to business functions. An external screen and keypad are useful for making calls and dashing of quick text messages.
Two chunky metal hinges connect the external and internal screens. The internal screen can be propped up at a comfortable angle like a laptop – useful for when you need to write a long email - or laid out flat on your desk.
The Nokia E90 is one of the most feature-packed smart phones the Finnish mobile phone giant has produced so far. Moving away from previous communicator handsets, the E90 runs on the Symbian 60 platform. Like the Nokia N95, the phones features a built in GPS receiver and Nokia maps. The sat-nav system does a good job of directing you from place to place, but it lags a bit when searching for a GPS signal and you have to pay extra for step-by-step instructions and voice navigation.
Although primarily a business phone, it's not all work and no play, as Nokia have included some exciting media functionality on the E90. There's an MP3 player, for example, that supports MP3, M4A, AAC, eAAC+ and WMA files, as well as an FM Radio. Audio quality is loud and clear, and the built in loudspeaker produces an excellent sound, even when face down. It is strange that Nokia should have chosen to give the handset a 2.5mm headphone jack instead of a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, as found on the Nokia N95. However, a converter will deal with this inconvenience. The phone comes with 128MB of internal memory for storing music files, videos and images, and has a microSD memory card slot which can provide up to 8Gb memory expansion.
The 3.2 megapixel camera features autofocus and an LED photo light. Relatively good compared to other smart phone cameras, the lack of Xenon flash nevertheless means that pictures turn out a little blurry in poor light. On-screen picture quality is fantastic, though some of this is lost when images are printed out at full size. You can also make videocalls on the E90 using the secondary VGA camera located on the front of the phone. Videos can be recorded, played back and shared with others via MMS or Bluetooth.
The E90 has a full range of connectivity options including Bluetooth, quad-band GSM, HSDPA and Wi-Fi. In spite of HSDPA support, the web browser can be quite slow to load pages, but once it’s up and running the large screen displays web pages with excellent clarity. Still, the browser is easy and somooth to operate, which makes a change from previous Communicators.
The Nokia E90 is pretty similar to the Nokia N95 when it comes to functionality. However, the E90 really stands out for its email capabilities. Reading and writing emails on the E90 is easy and efficient, and you can view and edit attachments using Quick Office, Zip Manager & Adobe Acrobat Reader. POP3, IMAP4 & SMTP are all supported on the email service.
Pros
Access speeds of up to 3.6 Mbps
Full QWERTY keyboard
Memory expansion up to 8GB via microSD
Cons
Bit of a pocket monster
Our Rating
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With large colour screen, full QWERTY keyboard, GPS navigation, push email with attachments, Nokia Active notebook, Office tool & a calendar, the E90 is like a pocket-sized office.
