Nokia N93

Discontinued
25th April 2006

The Nokia N93 is a very high-end camera phone/digital camcorder combo with a 3.2 megapixel digital camera with Carl Zeiss optics and 3X optical zoom. There's a large 2.4" 240x320 pixel display which swivels and twists around, and the Nokia N93 also supports WiFi and 3G.

You can see that the N93's design is very similar to the Nokia N92, and indeed it shares many similar characterstics (apart from the N92's digital TV tuner, of course). It's a big, chunky phone that weighs a whopping 180 grams - making it one of the heaviest handsets on the market. (Most 3G phones weigh 130 grams or less).

Although the Nokia N93 is packed with features, the most interesting element is the camera. The combination of a high-resolution 3.2 megapixel sensor plus the Carl Zeiss optics would be impressive enough, but the N93 one of a very small number of phones that includes optical zoom (in addition to up to 20X digital zoom). This combination of electronics and optical technology should mean that the N93 will be a seriously impressive stills camera.

But there's more to the N93's camera that stills photos. It can record video at up to 30 frames per second at 640x480 pixel resolution, so it's a very capable digital camcorder too. The N93 comes with Adobe Premiere Elements to help burn videos to DVD. The maximum record time on the N93 is 60 minutes and the miniSD slot can accept a memory card of up to 2Gb (a 128Mb card is included as standard in addition to 50Mb of internal memory). You can output video clips and photos directly to a television via the N93's TV interface.

From this, you might think that the Nokia N93 was a digital camcorder that can also make phone calls. But it's a fully rounded device, with a large display, web browser, email client and multimedia player. The N93 also has WiFi and Bluetooth, and it supports WCDMA 3G and EDGE high speed data.

Apart from the huge size, there seem to be very few downsides with the Nokia N93. It does everything you'd expect of a high-end Nseries mobile phone, running a suite of applications on top of the Symbian S60 3rd Edition operating system. The battery life is pretty reasonable at up to 5 hours talktime and 10 days standby, although you can expect that using all the gadgets on the N93 will start to drain the battery more quickly.

In reality, the are probably very few people who need the features that the Nokia N93 offers. However, it is probably the best camera phone we've seen to date and it is an extremely desirable device. Nokia say that the N93 will be priced at around 550 euros before tax and subsidy and should be available from July 2006.

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