Nokia E90 Review - Part I
1st August 2007
Looking for a phone that can knock the
all-conquering Nokia
N95 into a cocked hat? Well, the Nokia E90 might
well be that phone. We've acquired our very own E90
from Vodafone in the UK, and this will be the first
look at this "everything but the kitchen sink"
handset.
First of all we have to unbox it. Because
unboxing is basically geek porn we've moved it most
of the pictures to our Nokia
E90 Unboxing page.
Nokia E90 Sales Package

The standard Nokia E90 sales package
comes with the handset itself, a 512MB microSD card
with an adapter for SD card readers, a wired stereo
headset, standard Nokia charger, battery, CD-ROM and
a selection of manuals.
Note that this is a Vodafone UK sales
package, other operators may vary the package somewhat.
First impressions
It's a big phone, but quite well proportioned.
As tall as the old Nokia 6310i but a fair bit wider,
it could just about pass as a standard mobile phone
if you don't look too closely.
You can see that it's a much more conventional
phone than its two predecessors, the Nokia 9210i (left)
and Nokia 9500 (centre). You can instantly see that
the Nokia E90 (right) is a much squatter device.

In terms of weight, the Nokia E90 comes
in at a hefty 214 grams, compared to 233 grams for the
9500 and 245 grams for the 9210i.
Open them up and you can see that the
9500 (middle) and E90 (right) have broadly equivalent
keyboards, The Nokia 9210i (left) though is much
easier to use as it is larger and has good spacing between
the individual keys.

Be in no doubt that this is a BIG phone
- here the Nokia E90 is flanked by a Nokia
6131 (left) and an early 3G phone, the Sharp 902
to the right. The 6131 is a 101 gram phone, the 902
is 150 grams. You can see that the Nokia E90 is a very
heavy device.

This time we've added a Nokia
770 into the mix. The E90 (on the right) is more
compact than the 770, but that's mostly down to the
smaller screen on the E90.

The first thing we looked at on the
Nokia E90 was the quality of the web browser. Both the
Nokia 770 and E90 have very high density 800 pixel wide
displays. If you look carefully, you can see that they
are both rendered slightly differently. The relatively
short aspect ratio of the E90 means that you have to
scroll down quite a lot.
One clear difference between the Nokia
770 (and the Nokia
N800) and the Nokia E90 is the touchscreen - the
770/N800 use a touchscreen for almost every function,
and this is a feature completely lacking from the E90.
Navigating web pages on the keypad isn't quite as easy
as on the two Internet tablets.
The web browser isn't quite as intuitive
on the E90 as the 770. The all-important "back"
button is a particularly obscure key combination of
Chr-3.

Although Mobile Gazette renders
pretty well on the E90, the next test was the BBC
News site. You can see the problem immediately.
The BBC site detects the mobile browser on the E90 and
renders is as a "WAP" version, despite the
fact that the E90 can cope with the whole page rather
well.

One other difference is the screen brightness.
Although the E90 is pretty good, the 770 has a much
brighter display.
Other features
Two other features we looked at where
the GPS and camera. In this particular Vodafone package,
the GPS took a couple of minutes to get a fix to our
exact location and provided street-level mapping. This
is an application that works well on both the internal
and external displays, in fact it is slightly easier
to use on the external display.
Our initial look at the camera looks
promising - it has a 3.2 megapixel sensor, autofocus
and an impressively bright flash. We hope to bring you
some examples in our next installement.
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