Digital Trends

Nokia N93

December 27th, 2006 | by Stewart Wolpin

Features and Design

As noted, this phone is loaded, almost overwhelmingly so, and is arguably the most feature-laden phone on the market. The 3.2 MP camera uses Carl Zeiss optics rather than the normal cheap plastic lenses usually found on cell cams, and there's a tiny lens cap that you should tie the included cord to immediately. The camcorder encodes in RealVideo VGA 640 x 480 at 30 fps, but can play back MPEG-4 H.264 AVC — high definition video. The N93 also is UPnP and PictBridge compatible.

While you can't use the phone and its WiFi capabilities as a PC modem, you can use your home network or free hot spots (rather than expensive cell data minutes) to connect to the Web, and you can transfer or stream music, movies, and photos to and from the phone to a PC or the Web using SimpleCenter. However, SimpleCenter is "pull-only” software. If you're in a hot spot and can configure the phone, you can "pull" PC multimedia content, such as streaming music or pictures, to your phone. Unfortunately, you can't "push" (or transfer) new pictures or video from the phone to your PC from a remote locale; WiFi phone-to-PC transfer requires close physical proximity, similar to Bluetooth or IrDA. This could change, though, because the SimpleCenter people say "push" technology is on their product development roadmap.

If you like your connections more physical, the phone comes with a composite video/stereo cable like the kind you get with a camcorder, so you can view your photos or videos on your TV. It also comes with a USB data cable.

The N93 is also capable of making video calls, but you have to have access to a UMTS network and, presumably, the other caller has to have a video call-capable phone. Unless you call someone from your contact list, you are asked every time by the N93 if you want to make a video or voice call; this is an annoying extra step, considering the unlikelihood of ever making such calls. If you ever forget about this step, once you hit "Send," you'll put the phone to your ear expecting to get connected, but you won’t hear anything. You'll then take the phone down and look at the screen, only to find that the phone is still waiting for you to make the choice between video and voice calling.

Nokia has also included several multimedia software programs with the N93, such as Adobe Premiere Elements 2.0, Nokia Music Manager (software that lets you rip CDs and transfer music to the phone), and Nokia Lifeblog 2.0 to share your personal multimedia content.

Image Courtesy of Nokia