Review of the Nokia E90 Design and User Interface

Review of the Nokia E90 Design and User Interface
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Introduction

nokia e90 communicator

The Nokia E90 is a communicator style phone with a large landscape display. To be more precise, the Nokia E90 is a large bulky phone which may not be too comfortable to carry in your pocket on a day to day basis. This however may not be a bad thing for the business executive, as the size is perfect for sinking into the pocket of a jacket. The Nokia E90 was released in June 2007 as a follow up to the long overdue communicator type phones. The Nokia E90 communicator, as it is popularly known, was a welcome change as it came as part of the Nokia E-Series line of business oriented phones.

Design (4 out of 5)

Taking a look at the design of the Nokia E90 you cant help but love it or hate it. Anyway, it comes in either Red or Mocha right out of the box. When closed the Nokia E90 has dimensions that measure 132 x 57 x 20 mm and it weighs in at a hefty 210g.

The Nokia E90 has two displays, one which is visible when closed which is 2 inches in length, shows 16M colors at a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels. The Internal display measures 4 inches in length with a resolution of 800 x 352 pixels.

The front panel of the Nokia E90 has got a secondary camera for video calls. Next to it there is the ear piece and the external display mentioned above. There is also a softkey panel which has a D-pad, two softkey buttons and the call begin and the call end buttons. Below all of these on the front face is the numeric keypad.

Going over to the back of the Nokia E90 there is the battery compartment which is placed right below the 3.2MP camera and the LED flash.

The sides of the Nokia E90 house the slots for the microSD card and the microUSB sockets. There is also the jack for recharging the phone and another for connecting stereo headphones.

Flipping open the Nokia E90 reveals the larger internal display, with two softkey buttons on the right side of the display while on the left side there are the call begin and call end buttons.

The bottom half of the flip contains a full sized QWERTY keyboard with additional shortcut buttons that introduce quick one click access to features such as internet, menu display, address book, calendar and office documents.

User Interface (5 out of 5)

nokia E90

The user interface on the Nokia E90 Communicator is based on Symbian OS S60 version 3.2. This phone has a more consistent navigation model with the home screen being accessible with the single click of a dedicated button. There are several dedicated buttons which can be customized to serve as shortcuts to favorite applications.

The categories of applications are grouped in sections on the menu and include settings, office applications, regular applications, GPS applications and so on.

The home screen of the Nokia E90 is reserved for alerts and reminders from the organizer and also serves as a guide to the media you are listening to at any particular time.

The usage of this phone is comfortable thanks to the size of the keyboard.

Features (3 out of 5)

The Nokia E90 comes with impressive features which include two full color display screens, one external and the other internal.

There is support for downloadable ringtones which includes MP3 tones. Internal memory is set at 128 Mb with support of up to 8GB hot swappable external memory via microSD cards.

As far as data connectivity goes, the Nokia E90 supports not only GPRS and EDGE but also 3G at 3.6Mbps. There is the standard Wi-Fi support on the Nokia E90, Bluetooth Version 2, infra-red and miniUSB.

The Nokia E90 comes with a full HTML and WAP 2.0 browser. It allows you to get application and game downloads through the Internet. Also included in the Nokia E90 is a WMV/RV/MP4/3GP video player and a MP3/WMA/WAV/RA/AAC/M4A music player which comes with a video editor. To crown the multimedia features, there is an FM radio but no transmitter.

The camera on the Nokia E90 supports resolutions of up to 2048 x 1536 pixels with auto-focus and a photo editor. There is also a secondary camera for video calls.

The Nokia E90 comes with Mobile Office document editor giving it the ability to edit Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF and MS Office 2007 after downloading the free update. There are thousands of applications that can be installed on the Nokia E90 to give it an extended list of features.

Last but not least the Nokia E90 comes with a built-in A-GPS receiver and Nokia Maps preinstalled which can be used for turn-by-turn voice guided navigation.

Performance (3 out of 5)

nokia e90 communicator

The Symbian S60 on the Nokia E90 is generally a great OS with optimization for speed and that is exactly what you notice about the response of launching applications on this Nokia E-series phone. The drawback here is that the phone has sub par battery life and the situation is made worse when the GPS receiver is turned on for extended periods.

The other not so great thing about the Nokia E90 is the lack of a quality camera. Pictures are of general low quality and look grainy with a lot of noise.

The call quality and sound quality on the stereo headset are both quite good and that is topped off with the acceptable data connectivity rates.

All in all the phone may not match up to latest phone models today but, this phone has got good performance.

Verdict (3 out of 5)

Despite the bulky size and poor battery performance, the Nokia E90 comes out shining as a proud member of the Nokia E-series line of business phones. It is inevitable that any phone in the E-series family has a lot to live up to. You should be able to own a Nokia E90 for about $600.

Other notable members of the Nokia E-Series line of business phones include the Nokia E71, Nokia E72 and Nokia E55.