The Much Awaited Nokia E90 Communicator

At Last....!!! I have finally got my hands on a Nokia E90 Communicator to replace my older broken down "Personal Assistant" Nokia 9500 Communicator. Many commendable reviews on the internet had not helped one bit to salivate my desire to get one promptly as soon as it came out, but I was not desperate enough to purchase one just as soon as it was posted on a popular online store priced at a jaw dropping $1,798!?!? Ridiculously priced, but then again such price might have enticed others to purchase it, drawing the thought of one being the first to get it, awe-ing others to shredded jealousy.

Less than a week, and the much more reliable company announced their stock on Thursday, 5th July of the Nokia E90 Communicator, priced at $1,414, with a discount card. Thank God, I was not tempted by the former, otherwise I would have regretted paying the additional $384! Do you know how much Gambas Promodoro I could eat with that kind of dough???

I have been all smiles from ear to ear for a few days of getting it, synch-ing it flawlessly with my intermediary Nokia E61i 3 weeks old phone and using the basic stuff of phone calls and messages leaving the weekend to indulge myself on the new "expensive" gadget.

I have been a keen follower of the Nokia Communicator series, having used previously the 9500 model, the 9210i, the 9210 and the 9110i. Probably the full qwerty keyboard attracted me to it as well as its PDA capabilities to enhance your personal management whilst on the road. My very first personal digital assistant (PDA) was a Casio 64KB way back in the early eighties which had a name and address feature, alarm clock, calculator, calender, time zones, and a 2X3 inch module where you can stick in games or an additional memory of 64KB and it was a really cool gadget then. Yeap, dad finally gave it to me after years of persistence and arguments that its not cool to leave it stuck in the box inside a drawer after many years.

Coming back to when I had my Nokia Communicators, there were other gadgets that came out which had touch pad screens and had rave reviews, the Palm V was one of them, then the HP came out with a PDA phone, the Dopods, the treos, and yet somehow or rather I still preferred the keyboard PDAs; talk about being stubborn and old fashioned even with friends and brands around flaunting and pimping their hardware, I still wouldn't budge with my own preference. I'm glad I did. However, I do annoy my friends every now and again just to play the games on their touch paddy phones. Hehehe

Anyway, here are my findings on the new communicator, although this does not reflect the thought of others:

Physically, the phone was solidly built, from the metallic bronze hinges to the layout of the keypads both in front and the qwerty keyboard inside. The sound produced from ring tones to voice was clear and dynamic both on handset or on speaker phone. The camera, although pretty awkward at first due to its automatic focus at first press of the button then full push down for the actual picture taking was pretty sharp at 3.2megapixel. However, using the zoom more than half way produced a grainy picture, same result when using it in darker background, even with a built in flash. But it was still acceptable in normal circumstances. The screen, ah yeah the screens both inside and outside produced a brilliant display, sharp ,vivid and crisp, I believe this is due to its 16 million true colour technology.

The built in wireless LAN was superb, detecting nearby wireless access points quickly, even browsing the internet with it's internet browsing software was awesomely fast! A flick of a button and using the Service Provider's GPRS allowed surprisingly fast log ons. I didn't have long to wait and I was happily browsing the internet at a comfortable pace, switching tabs and looking at my favourite websites. Even logging to my mobile messenger and Agile Messenger was impressively fiaaaast (American accent with an attitude). I believe its the combination of processor speed, the newly incorporated Symbian S60 Operating system compared to the older archaic Symbian S80 in older communicators and the more than ample memory that has made the latest communicator a pretty wicked portable internet speed demon.

The Qwerty keyboard is sturdy but abit stiff; you need to really push it to make it go. But in due time, its easy to get used to the stiff keys, and maybe after a while it should be okay. I can't help repeating how solid the phone feels, study in every sense, and what makes it even more impressive is how the heck did Nokia fit everything in to one gadget the size of the older small-"ER" Nokia 9300i, slimmer than than the 9500 which some call it as a brick, and yet slot in camera both in front and inside, put in a wireless with 54kbps (802.11g) and get the full qwerty keyboard on?

On a darker side though, and I believe a few communicator ardent fans may notice, especially when browsing the contacts that the search function is limited to name searching only, and not like the previous Nokia 9500 communicator whereby if you search under company or phone numbers or even nicknames, a list of names will appear. This feature although lacking in this new communicator, maybe a small drawback or not really important to some, but I believe that it is quite essentially an important part of the communicator's appeal; albeit your very own Personal Assistant (PA). However, the E90 provides a name grouping which might help, but it isn't the same innit? For me, I feel that it is a loss of function that needs to be rectified, a view that might be shrugged aside by others. Some say just appeal to Nokia to get that functionality in, its just a matter of making a complaint to their website and they will revise the OS.

The calendar is not as friendly as previous communicators, especially when you have a reminder that that you can set every day, or for every month. With the previous 9500 communicator, when you set a task, it prompts you the day and date as well as time and the alarm for reminder and there is a tab for occurences where you can pick either everyday or monthly or weekly and then you're set. I usually use this function for my prayer times, my mobile phone month cycles, my credit card cycles etc. Yes, the E90 can do that, but it needs more tinkering rather than within the wizard setup of the task.

Another function missing is the fax capability, although not as important as before, because we can always use email function, the messenger functions, the phone and the sms function, but hey the E90 is supposed to be the most complete Personal Digital Assistant there is to date and some businesses, corporate even govt entities require hard copy proof of things!?!

On the brighter side though, the E90 comes with a much welcomed GPS capability especially when you want to travel overseas and use the maps, it has alot of additional features which was not available or had to be installed using third party software on the older generation communicators. Push to talk function (when is the service providers gonna give us that functionality huh?), bigger memory upgrades capability, etc. Touche for that!

All in all, I would say the the E90 is a nice phone, well built, alot of niceties despite a few much amissed older functionality. If you're really comfortable with a full size qwerty keyboard sort of guy, then this is is the PDA phone to get no doubt about it. But you are otherwise, then I would certainly recommend the Nokia E61i with exactly the same functionality but in a small form factor. To sum it up, the new Nokia E90 Communicator IS a Nokia E61i with a keyboard on steroids.

MY PERSONAL RATING:
1) New Nokia E90 Communicator * * * * 1/4

2) Nokia E61i * * * * *