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MatD's Symbian pages : Nokia N90 Review
This new Nokia phone, is one of the most "bizarre" ones because you can turn and flip the camera and the display it as if you were playing with a magical dice. But it's not a phone to play! This phone is 3G compatible and has a Carl Zeiss lense to use with the 2 Megapixel camera. I think the main idea behind this phone, is to give him the same feature like a little low-budget camera. In fact the N90 has two modes that enables you to take either pictures ( and of course videos) by holding the phone like a videocamera, or if the N90 is closed, you can use it like a normal "flat" camera.
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CSD EGPRS GPRS HSCSD WCDMA

Dimensions 112 x 51 x 24 mm
Weight 173 g
Display 352 x 416
Camera 2 megapixel camera with 20x digital
Colors 18 bit
Storage Internal : 30 MB
   
Platform Symbian OS 8.1a Feature Pack 3
Battery Up to 3 hours in communication
Standby 12 days

First impression and interface
The first impression when holding the phone in your hand is that it's quite "heavy" and feels like holding a block. The fact that you can turn the camera module ( it's in fact a block that can be turned ( 300 degrees) separately from the rest of the phone. It's the grey right part on the picture.

     
Main screen
Menu
Gallery

The resolution of the screen is higher than the past Series 60 mobile phones enabling you to have a better quality. The apps compiled with Series60 Feature Pack 1/2 versions should be recompiled in FP3 in order to fit the correct resolution of the display
The icons and the interface looks very well and kinda "Apple-like".

Camera, camera
The camera has a 2 Mega Pixel resolution and a Carl Zeiss Optic. When you want to take a photo you have two ways to use your mobile phone : either you can use it like a video camera or like a normal camera.

The fact that the camera is able to turn enables you to use videotelephony. The inbuilt Flash enables you to take good printable photos, unfortunately the digital zoom is bad because you won't distinguish anything when using it: no sharpness can be guaranteed when using the digital zoom. I think for webblogs the picture quality of these digital zoom pictures are acceptable.

Click to see the full picture
Picture taken with digital zoom
A picture with lots of details (1600 x 1200 pixels)


Multimedia
Watching video clips on the phone won't be a problem ! The inbuilt player will enable you to read MP3, AMR and 3GP files. With the Nokia headset you can listen to full stereo, which turns your Nokia N90 into a good MP3 Player. Unfortunately there's no FM Receiver, but to be quite frank I've almost used three times the radio function on my Nokia 3230, so this is not a so dramatic missing feature!
The picture gallery is also nicely presented and uses cool animations to show up each picture.
Connectivity

Be sure I won't "re-complain" the lack of mRouter for developers! I'm critizing this absence of "developer" friendly connectivity for each new Nokia release ;-). Nevermind: the N90 comes up with the usual connectivity options : Bluetooth and USB Port through the Pop'Port.
Of course there's no IR , so if you have an older PDA, you won't be able to connect it with your N90.
Nice features
I'm changing almost each day my USIM Card from one phone to others. So the most interesting feature is the auto-translation of each Menu text elements depending on which USIM card you inserted. e.g : if you place a T-Mobile Germany USIM you'll get all the menus in german. If you place an Orange France USIM you'll get all the menus in french

Little bugs
The N90 like the Nokia 3230 restarts randomly for an unknown reason. Perhaps it's to clean up the memory, in order to let the program to be executed more quickly after the restart. Hum... I don't know if it's acceptable, but aren't we getting used to restart our PC several times a day ? lol

Sometimes when your N90 will be closed, you will see that the little display won't correctly display the clock. The clock looks like a broken calculator LCD display.

 
 
 

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