Digital Trends

Nokia N90 April 20th, 2006 | by Stewart Wolpin

Performance

While perhaps appropriate for a camera, the N90's ergonomics can be awkward for a cell phone. True, the swivel top enables you to mold the phone to match your ear-to-cheek-to-mouth contours, but it's difficult to hold and maintain this odd position, and you have to be conscious that your finger could smudge the camera lens.

The N90's performance belies this clunkiness, however; reception on Cingular's network was consistent and calls sounded soft and gentle on the ear. Unfortunately, we couldn't get our SIM card to work with the phone's Web capability.

The Symbian OS look and feel of the phone also keeps things simple, at least at first. Instead of the usual jumble of dozens of confusing icon functions, the main menu screen lists only the N90's five primary functions: phone book, messaging, calendar, gallery, and image print. But once you get past these initial options to each function's secondary options, you will find them arrayed in the now-familiar jumble of icons. However, both the two soft menu keys and the circular navigational array can be programmed to get you directly to the frequently-used function of your choice.

The N90's digital pictures were spectacular—or, at least, spectacular when compared to other VGA or 1.3-megapixel cell cam photos. You see plenty of detail and bright, vivid colors at the top-of-the-line 1600 x 1200 resolution in shots taken in bright sunshine. But even with the N90's impressive photo technologies, you'll still want to take a more serious digital camera with you on vacations or for other important occasions. Shots taken inside or in less than sunny conditions were still superior to most lower resolution cell cam candids, but were bleached and fuzzy in comparison to pictures taken by a run-of-the-mill, standalone, 5-MP camera. As you'd imagine, the flash is useless in the dark and nearly useless for anything other than close-ups and shadow fill. If you plan on e-mailing your shots, you'll have to step down the resolution, resulting in a still lower-quality snap.

Unfortunately, video quality is only 15 frames-per-second and is as herky-jerky as old silent films.

Despite the large LCD screen, the 4.5-hour talk time and 10-day standby battery life is on a par with less-endowed cell cams.

Image Courtesy of Nokia