Nick Parkin’s Blog

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Here it is – “Nokia N90 Review”

March 23, 2006 · 3 Comments

Nokia has a new baby or at least a whole herd of them. They call them the ‘N’ series Nokias. They are simply put ultra-smart phones. The problem with them the ‘N’ series phones is that they are terribly hard to find and I know this because I attempted to find one. After phoning many different shops and distributions I managed to get my hands on Nokia’s N90, the uber-stylish camera and multimedia phone. It only seems right to give you a review of this brilliant phone.

After phoning around for a day and having finally located and bought the phone I was rearing to get to open the device. You probably aren’t interested in the box but just quickly I must compliment Nokia on a wonderful new idea of actually showing the phone inside the box. How many times have been disappointed with a product because it doesn’t look like it does on the box? With this new solution this problem will never happen again.

After placing the phone in my hand for the first time one of the things that I noticed was this baby was quite big. If you want to know the size, imagine a Samsung D600, same width, same thickness but about one cm added onto the top. Before even popping the battery in and turning on the phone I was flipping it open and swilling the display.

Luckily I already had a battery that was fully charged from my old phone so all I had to do was stick it inside. I pressed the button on top of the device and within seconds N90 was booting up. The device takes quite along time to boot up in my experience, about 30 seconds, but I suppose that this is because of the rather powerful operating system that runs the phone.

After entering your password you are greeted with a very smart main page. This page has a series of five shortcuts along the top and a space showing all of your “today” calendar items underneath. Of course I had no calendar items so the main start page was quite empty and plain; just the way I like it to be.

Coming from other makes and models of phones I had completely forgotten about the dedicated Nokia menu button that you press to show the menu. This little button took me quite a while to learn where it was but when I found out I quickly became used to it.

It is best at this time to talk about the actual operating system of the phone and the applications that run on the phone. For those of you who know a little more about Nokia’s than the rest of us will know that the phone runs on an operating system called Symbian60 or Series60. Symbian60 is basically like the Windows for your phone. The operating system operates your phone and allows you to run various applications. In this case, Symbian60, has a huge amount of applications for your phone so you can customize it exactly the way you would like it. The phone comes loaded with applications for every task so if you do not feel like downloading and installing more applications as there are already a whole heard of them on the phone.

Another very big factor of the phone that seems to be Nokia’s major selling point of the phone is the camera. I have tried the camera out many times now and the quality in all cases is amazing. For those camera loving people who are reading this I will tell you one thing; this phone has a Carl Ziess lens which as you know is one of the best lenses in the world. The images are clear and crisp when taken with the camera and the video quality is comparable to video tape quality. I had no problem with printing the photos and at photo size they looked like they had been taken off a normal digital camera.

The biggest problem with this phone is the fact that it is quite a chunky phone. For the person that just wants the basics of a phone I recommend something else but for someone that wants a very functional phone with good multimedia capabilities then this is the phone for you.

My Mark: 83%

Categories: Review