Nokia e90

The Nokia E90 Communicator is the latest in a long line of communicator devices, and is the replacement for the Nokia 9500 which was announced three years ago.To say that the E90 is "long awaited" would be an understatement. One of the weaknesses of the 9500 and the 9300 and 9300i devices derived from it was a lack of 3G support, and the E90 now adds that. But it's more that just a port of the old Communicator platform to 3G, the Nokia E90 also adds a GPS receiver and integrated navigation application, a 3.2 megapixel camera, FM radio and a significantly improved screen. As with the 9500, the Nokia E90 retains WiFi support and has a full QWERTY keyboard (although the keyboard has been improved in the E90).Inside the E90 is a display with an impressive 800x352 pixels resolution in 16 million colours, not unlike the panel on the Nokia N800, this is up from 640x200 pixels on the earlier models. The external display is now 240x320 pixels (up from 128x128), and pretty much all of the E90's functions can be controlled from the front cover, rather than the 9500/9300/9300i which allowed access to basic phone functions only. The 800 pixel wide display is ideal for no-compromise web access, although it doesn't have touchscreen support.Of course, the E90 bears the "Communicator" name for a reason, and it comes with a wide range of communications options. Email support includes standard SMTP/POP3 protocols, various push email options, instant messaging and it even comes with a text-to-speech reader. Network support is quad-band GSM (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) plus 2100 MHz UMTS (3G), GPRS and EDGE. Significantly, the Nokia E90 does include HSDPA support allowing for download speeds of up to 3.6Mbit/sec. On top of this the E90 comes with 802.11g WiFi. It's hard to fault the E90 in terms of the networks it supports, but one omission is the ability to work with UMTS networks on anything other than the 2100 MHz band, which limits its 3G use in the US and some other countries.More controversially, the Nokia E90 includes a 3.2 megapixel camera with autofocus and flash. Many business do not like cameras in their business phones, and for some it was an issue with the 9500 (which had a VGA resolution camera) which was resolved with the camera-less 9300. There's also a secondary camera for video calling.As with previous models, the Nokia E90's software capabilities are impressive. It includes a document editor called Quickoffice, can view Microsoft Office documents, work with Zip files and PDFs and there's a comprehensive set of Personal Information Management tools. Because this is an S60 device, more applications can be added.. although most will need to be adapted for the E90's display.Another important feature is the Nokia E90 Communicator's inbuilt GPS function. This allows for more than just basic location-based services, as Nokia are going to make it's "Nokia Maps" application available. Although this seems to be a free SatNav (satellite navigation) package, it's worth remembering that a lot of the value added features require a network connection which might incur data costs.On top of all the other features, the Nokia E90 Communicator is also a multimedia phone, with support for MP3 and AAC audio plus video clips. There's even an FM radio. Data and media clips can be stored on microSD cards with a maximum capacity of 2GB.In conclusion, the Nokia E90 Communicator is possibly the most feature packed handset we've even seen with surprisingly few compromises. It's big for a phone, but tiny for a GPS enabled multimedia computer. At Mobile Gazette, we've been a big fan of the Communicator series, and you can bet that we'll be eager to get our hands on this latest incarnation.