Nokia N93i Review

Messaging:

The Messages menu has nothing new to offer – you can easily compose SMS/MMS or Email and located in My Folder are templates which are handy for text that is often used in messages. The fast T9 can help you enter text quickly. The EDGE and UMTS connection help for fast retrieving of Emails.




Connectivity:
Nokia N93i could be easily connected with other devices for synchronization, Internet or data exchange as USB, infrared, Bluetooth, WiFi, UMTS (only EU/Asian 2100 Mhz) are available. The main drawback of the phone is the only tri-band (900/1800/1900 MHz) GSM module which makes it suitable mainly for Europe/Asia market and with partial functionality in America.

The phone has an IrDA port, located on the left side of the handset, and offers another option for connectivity with other devices, but it's an outdated technology and it's present in very few phone models these days, so we find it unnecessary.

In most contemporary phones it is completely replaced by Bluetooth. The N93i offers the latest version 2. It is an absurd that the multimedia A2DP and AVRCP profiles are not supported, which means that the N93i cannot transmit music through Stereo Bluetooth. This is probably a limitation of the OS versions and just another example why the N93i should run on v.9.2. As EDR (Enhanced Data Rate) is supported, you can transfer files to compatible devices at high speed (up to 3 Mbit/s) which is convenient when sending large files like photos, videos and music.

Nokia N93i also supports Wi-Fi (802.11b/g), which is a wireless network standard allowing access to the Internet at all hotspots (places with such kind of network), as well as usage of IP telephony via additional software. Through Wi-Fi you can also stream music or video fast (and free) to your phone, or download some new multimedia content. We used it for browsing the internet through the Web browser, for the Maps service and for streaming or downloading Videos from the Internet.

For over-the-air data you can connect through both 2G GPRS/EDGE or through 3G UMTS, but unfortunately the latter supports 2100MHz band only, which means it will work in Europe/Asia, but not in the US, where 850/1900MHz UMTS is needed. Unlike N95, the N93i doesn’t support HSDPA.

Like most other Nokia phones, along with the N93i comes a CD with Nokia PC Suite. The software has a nice interface with logically structured and easy to use menus, but the options supported are nothing special – here we have the standard backup and synchronize, connecting the PC to the Internet via the phone, managing contacts, messages, multimedia and applications. Even if you've never used Nokia PC Suite you won't experience any troubles working with it and establishing a connection between the PC and the phone would be no problem with the USB cable provided with the N95. When connected to the USB cable, you can choose which mode the N95 should enter in: Media Player, PC Suite, Mass storage, or PictBridge. PC Suite is the one we've described above, while the Mass storage is most suitable for transferring lots of images, music or videos from the computer to the phone or vice versa.

Internet browsing
RSS reader

Internet browser:

Thanks to the UMTS/HSDPA data (or the WiFi) and the QVGA resolution of the display, loading and viewing a standard HTML web pages is a pleasure. The phone has no problem rendering all pages and reading phoneArena's news was a pleasure. Scrolling left-to-right and top-to-bottom is done with the phone's d-pad, and a mini-map shows you, which part of the page you are looking at. The pages loaded pretty fast and as a whole, we had a great experience with the browser, so we definitely like it more than the Internet Explorer, built in Pocket PC phones based on Windows Mobile. The browser can load RSS feeds for even faster access to information.


What we loved about it is the history: when you use 'back' to see pages you've seen earlier, you see the pages as thumbnails, you can open from the phone's cache.