PureMobile sent us in for a review one of Nokia’s newest and most powerful handsets: the E90. The E90 is a Communicator-class device and very popular among businessmen, but also among system administrators too (one of our friends, sysadmin at Google, is using Nokia’s qwerty/wifi devices specifically for SSH access). Read on for our review of the impressive E90.The Nokia E90 is a quad-band GSM & 2100 Mhz HSDPA device. It has two 16mil color TFT screens, one QVGA external and one 800×352 internal landscape. It has 128 MB of internal flash, 128 MB RAM, a microSD hotswap port, and it runs on 330 Mhz ARM CPU. It comes with Wi-Fi 802.11b/g, Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP support and an IrDA port. It uses the Nokia connector for charging, but for data exchange it’s using a standard miniUSB 2.0 port. It also comes with a 2.5mm headphone jack, full GPS support, Push to talk for usage outside of USA, FM radio, a 3.2 MP camera with autofocus, and a secondary QCIF video-call camera. The smartphone weighs 210 grams, although it doesn’t feel too big because of its ultra-wide design. In the box we found the handset, a battery, a 512 MB microSD card, a charger, a beautiful belt case, a stereo headset and the appropriate CDs/manuals.
The E90 is running Symbian OS v9.2, S60 rel. 3.1 and the phone came by default with the latest available firmware. Nokia usually provides up to 2 years of firmware support for their business-oriented Communicators (and up to 1 year for their popular consumer models), so we are sure that we will see a number of firmware upgrades in the future that not only fix bugs but also add small new features.
The smartphone is very well-built and it has an impressive stature. We tested its wireless capabilities and we were impressed by the good voice quality, fast WiFi and ultra-speedy Bluetooth file exchange. The A2DP feature worked well with 3 out of 4 Bluetooth headsets we tried it with. Regarding GPS, we had trouble locking on to a satellite, just like we had with an earlier firmware version of the N95. Since then Nokia added AGPS assistance to their GPS hardware module, resulting in faster satellite lock-in. We hope to see this new feature on the E90 soon too after a firmware upgrade.
When using the E90 with its external screen, the usability of the handset is pretty much the same as with all other S60 3.1 devices. Good quality keypad, standard buttons, and a standard set of software applications plus some business-specific ones like Office suite, Blackberry connectivity etc. But when you open the communicator to reveal the big qwerty keyboard and big screen, the interface changes a bit with the soft-buttons getting on the side rather than below the screen. We had to constantly change the location of our fingers up and down in order to cater to both typing and using the soft-buttons. Especially for Java applications (e.g. Opera Mini) this is a problem because the soft-buttons don’t change orientation. I believe that a better design would have been having a somewhat “wider” but “less long” body with an 800×480 resolution and the soft-buttons above the hardware keyboard. Especially for my small hands it would make it easier to type as currently the device is a tad too long to position my hands correctly on it. Nevertheless, keyboard quality is very good and it gives you great tactile feedback. You could potentially type very fast on it.
Regarding the multimedia capabilities of the phone I found the h.264/mp4 support very pleasing, especially on the wide screen. The camera quality is above average, although the application that controls has a bit of a learning curve in it. The external camera can grab VGA video which is pretty impressive. The video-call camera can only be used for calls, and it won’t let you grab any pictures or video from it, which is a bit disappointing because I could even see some business usage on this. FM Radio quality was top notch (requires headphones in order to use that as an antenna), while the updated music application has better usability and features than the version found on most S60 3.0 devices.
Our favorite feature on the E90 was again its VoIP functionality. Using GizmoProject, we called to Greece and in mainland USA, and we never had any problem with it. For VoIP alone, it’s a good reason to get a WiFi-enabled Nokia smartphone. The other reason is of course native applications. There are currently about 300 native apps for S60 3.x, and the ones we tried worked great with both the small and big screens, except Opera Mobile, which will probably need to be updated. Opera Mini had some trouble with the large screen too, it would not figure out that it was running on a 800-wide screen and lots of pages had menu text rendering on top of each other (a problem not occurring on smaller screens). Nevertheless, the built-in WebKit browser does the job well, and it now has support for WAP pages too (the original S60 3.0 version didn’t).
Regarding battery life we managed 4.5 hours of talk time and well-over a week on stand-by with normal usage. In fact, because we are based in USA we turned off HSDPA support, and so battery standby life took an extra kick!
Overall, we can’t recommend enough this handset. It has great software and almost perfect hardware design. Sure, it comes at a higher price, but business users will probably recognize the value it brings to their everyday work and opt for it.
Rating: 9/10
It sounds good, but it’s over $1000 @ PureMobile. I can’t imagine it’s good enough to justify that…
That MP4 video clip quality is crap!
I would expect WAY better quality for a $1000+ phone!
The video quality is pretty good for a cellphone. There are very few phones that do VGA video recording, and the ones that do, don’t do it for more than 15 fps. The E90 grabs 24fps.
Eugenia,
For a 640×480 video, at a stream bitrate of ~2,400BPS (3,000 peak!), that’s VERY aweful quality (for the price)
The bitrate is usually the same percentage for all phones. It’s always mjpeg you see. Also, as you saw, picture quality is not bad, which means that video quality might get better with upcoming firmware upgrades.
Nice smart phone with a distinctive look. want one plz
I remember when Ballmer commented that “That is the most expensive phone in the world!” regarding the iPhone. See the clip here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5oGaZIKYvo&eurl= Honestly, the E90 does seem like a very nice phone, but I don’t see anything that revolutionary, anything to justify $1,084 (unlocked finally!). Although, I don’t even have an iPhone, so I’m probably a bit more cautious than most technophiles. Maybe someone can try and convince me.
Edited 2007-07-26 06:16
Being unlocked is a feature btw. I would never, as long as I live, get a locked phone.
I would get a locked phone well before I paid over a $1000 for a phone. What I will pay for is small(but not too small) WiFi device for IM, mail, web, along with some PDAish media functionality, but I don’t really want a phone to do that. The Nokia N800 looks interesting, but isn’t quite there yet, and while the iPhone looks nice I want the iPhone without the phone, and maybe a slightly larger screen.
How does this compare to the E70, which also has a nice keyboard and SSH features?
I won’t buy either – they don’t work with Verizon – but if the E90 looks neat but is too pricey, the E70 might be a nicer alternative for some.
The E70 is not quad-band, so if you travel a lot, it’s not a great solution. More over, the E70 runs an older version of the OS, and it’s not supported via firmware upgrade anymore (it only had 2 firmware upgrades, its life was short). Changing from landscape to portrait was taking up to 3 seconds, while it’s instantaneous between the two screens on the E90.
I have the Nokia e70. While I love the phone, I often get problems with the RAM. I hit the “Memory Full” message all the time for a lot of sites. Does the e90 have better RAM memory?
Yes, it is has 128 MBs of RAM instead of 64. I have heard about the “memory full” problem on the E70 btw. It was fixed on future upgrades for most of the other 3.0 phones, but the E70 only had few firmware upgrades.
What Eugenia said.. and the fact that it’s harder to find
I ordered one but the site hasn’t shipped it yet and it’s been 5 days. It’s not easy to find cheap.
Eugenia, did you try HTC Advantage? I’m a sysadmin looking for something to replace my current Blackberry, the Advantage seems quite nice with its giant TFT, and feature and price wise it’s comparable to the E90 (better for the 8GB HD and worst for the OS
)
I don’t have any HTC devices except the QTek 9100. However, AFAIK, there is no *stable* SSH client for Windows Mobile. There are 4-5 of them out there, but none working well. More over, there is no good, stable VoIP SIP client for WinMob either. So if you ware interested just in SSH and VoIP, the E90 is a better choice. If you are interested in lots and lots of apps and UI flexibility, then the WinMob is a better choice.
Recently announced HTC Kaiser seems to be much more interesting. Honestly, I am a big fan of Symbian and using Nokia N80 myself, but this time I must confess that Kaiser running Windows Mobile 6 is likely to be much more proffesional solution.
Also regarding SSH and VOiP: Windows Mobile 6 comes with VOiP integrated. Also, there are few more SSH applications for WM, some of them featuring port forwarding which none of the AFIK two available Symbian ssh clients can do.
http://www.codebrowser.org/index.php – zaTunnel and zaTelnet. haven’t used them, but they seem to be actively developed so might be worth a try.
Edited 2007-07-26 12:20
Size really doesn’t matter to me.
I love Nokia E61i, it really worth the price, IMHO.
Hey,
I’m curious on how compatible the whole Series 60 is with Linux. Is it e.g. possible to sync contacts and calendars? Is it possible to read sms messages from the phone and to access the phone’s file system or flash cards?
Cheers,
apalacheno
I don’t think so, but I think it has SyncML support.
Maybe take this aspect in future reviews into consideration?
Smart gadgets are no longer stand-alone devices, but (this is even more true for Symbian) are built to be interoperable with computers, so IMO this is an important feature, in particular for us Linux enthusiasts.
they are full compatible, I use my E65 (S60 3rd) to sync PIM with Evolution, works great with contacts (even with pictures both sides), calendar entries and task, better even than my old palm. I can also send .txt and recieve it as a note on the phone and send as a SMS, MMS or an EMAIL, is perfect the integration with linux and a bluetooth device (never tried with the cable).
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=260676
there are some instruction how to do that, however, the author says its only for contacts but works for everything .