Excellent Mobile From The House Of Nokia

Nokia has to offer at least one phone that can also double as a capable club-like weapon. Jokes aside their E90 is one heck of a capable device. It follows the classic Communicator design in being very much like a compass box, and will remind you of the E9500 and E9300. But under the hood lie an entire new set of innards. And the build quality is unmatchable, as is the superb finish.

The E90 has two screensboth are very high resolution and both feature 16 million colours. An autofocus 3.2 megapixel camera that actually offers superb quality may have you forgetting that this is essentially a PDA phone and not a teenagers dream gadget. The inner screen is an ultra wide 4 inches, although the phone becomes bulky as a result, and weighs a hefty 210 grams.

The number keypad is well laid out and very usable, and the E90 is very usable as a phone without ever opening the lid! The inner keypad is a QWERTY, and although the keys are well laid out and large enough, the feedback can only be described as clicky and hard to pressnot something a corporate user typing out 20 mails a day really wants to hear. And thats the E90s main clientelethe business user. There are seven Symbian shortcut keys available for speeding up regular corporate tasks.

Although the outer joypad (D-pad in Nokia speak) works really well the inner one is clicky, which is our major gripe with the keypad and the phone in general. Going by the business users need to travel the Nokia E90 incorporates GPS as well. Thanks to the high resolution inner screen (800 x 352 pixels) web browsing is a real treat, something of a novelty that we havent seen since the Imate Jasjar days. As a business phone the E90 makes a lot of sense, although office document editing features are a little low as are the formatting options. In terms of office productivity Symbian is still not up to the mark for MS Windows based PDAs.

Although application support for Symbian is rich, most of the business grade applications are still developed for the Windows Mobile platform, thanks to Microsofts strong developer support programmes. However thanks to superb multimedia features the E90 gets a little more attractive. In fact attractive enough to recommend to the user who wants something to make a strong statement with. Although we cringe to think of the typical 18 year old college kid sporting an E90, because of the superb look, build quality, features and the sheer image of the Communicator series, this may well be possible. At Rs 40,139 the E90 asks for a lot. Serious business users will want to look at something more of a PDA, and less of a Mobile Phone.