Digital Trends

Nokia N90 April 20th, 2006 | by Stewart Wolpin

Features and Design

While the N90 has a plethora of camera features, you're buying it because it is first and foremost a tri-band (900/1800/1900) world-band EDGE cell phone. It also is endowed with the Symbian Series 60 operating system, which supports the phone's varying PDA functions.

From the outside, you wouldn't guess that the N90 is a cell phone or a digital camera. Except for the 1.5-inch LCD screen, there are no distinctive external clues to the N90's primary or secondary functions.

At 4.41” x 2” x .94”, the N90 is around a third larger than most modern cell cams, and at 6.1 ounces, nearly twice as heavy. But this camera phone also has more moves than Kobe Bryant. Atop the clamshell hinge is a rotating camera lens, which swings around nearly 360 degrees. When you twist the camera top, the camera is automatically activated with the external screen acting as viewfinder. To see what you're shooting, though, you're better off separating the two clamshell halves, which splay out from closed to nearly flat (like a cheerleader's split), and then twisting the 2.1-inch 262,144-color LCD top half up and around so it's perpendicular to the keypad bottom half. With these swiveling parts, you can capture all the weird shooting angles your aesthetic senses allow.

Unlike most cell cams, there is only one set of camera controls, on the left spine next to the RS-MMC memory card slot. This positioning is perfect for thumb control when you open up the N90 to use the inside LCD as the view screen. But it you keep the phone closed, the positioning is on the top left, which forces you to use the camera like a southpaw and requires some gripping dexterity so your left fingers don't block the lens.

Equipped with an f/2.9-5.5mm Carl Zeiss lens and a 24-bit, 16.7-million CMOS color imaging chip, the N90 shoots 1600 x 1200 pixel 2-megapixel stills, lower resolution 800 x 600 (.5 MP) and VGA 640 x 480 (.3 MP) JPEGs, and 30-second to one-hour, 15-frames-per-second, 352 x 288 pixel MPEG-4 video clips. There's an 8x digital zoom, white balance, and a self-timer, but only a small flash. You can also play QuickTime and Real video clips, as well as MP3 and unprotected AAC audio tracks, but not WMA. However, the N90 does not play stereo through the proprietary headphone jack or through the ridiculously tiny speaker on top of the lens, so all those music playback options are useless appendages.

You do get plenty of storage for whatever digital data you shoot or import into the phone—31 MB of built-in memory, supplemented by an included 64-MB memory card. The N90 is equipped with Bluetooth and PictBridge and includes a USB cable, any of which can be used to transfer photos from phone to PC or printer.

Even with the generous geography available on the inside surfaces, the plainly laid out and white backlit dialpad keys are no larger than those on phones half the N90's size.

Image Courtesy of Nokia