Nokia E90 Communicator Review

Back in the early 2005, Nokia was already offering a bunch of Symbian smartphones but they were named in the standard for the brand manner of four digits (i.e. 6600, 6620, 7610) which isn’t really easy to remember and doesn’t give idea about the exact phone. Only the higher end models were positioned in their own group, being called the Communicators. This clearly distinguished them from the others.

In the second quarter of the same year, Nokia changed the manner in which it forms the names of the phones, announcing the N-series. Phones like N70 and N90 appeared, aiming the “N-series” as multimedia phones. This rebranding was successful, and Nokia carried on and announced the E-series of Enterprise targeted devices. Obviously, there was an overlap as the Communicators were also Enterprise oriented, so it was logical that the latter will become a part of the larger E-series. This became a reality in February 2007, when the E90 Communicator was announced. It kept the “Communicator” label from the previous 9500 but was named in typical for the E-series manner.

Coming 3 years after its predecessor, it was sure that the new model will have lots of improvements. Probably the biggest one is that it now uses the standard OS found in any other Nokia smartphone – the Symbian over S60 interface. Last generation Communicators used S80 interface which limited them to only S80 applications which were not a lot. Using S60 means that any optimized S60 app will work on the E90, which is a great advantage. Another improvement is that unlike before, the E90 is smartphone even when closed. In this case it uses also fully functional Symbian S60 unlike the 9500/9300(i) which used Nokia’s S40 interface when closed. This means that on the go, the E90 is closed and offers you as much options as the N95 does. When opened, it stands out of the crowd with huge 800-pixel display and 6-row QWERTY, turning into a small computer.

Model	Dimension (Inches)	Dimension (mm)	Weight (oz)	Weight (Gramms)
Nokia E90	5.19" x 2.24" x 0.78"	132 x 57 x 20	7.40	210
Nokia 9500	5.83" x 2.20" x 0.95"	148 x 57 x 24	7.83	222
HTC TyTN II	4.40" x 2.32" x 0.74"	112 x 59 x 19	6.70	190

Interface:

The E90 Communicator is a Symbian v9.2 S60 phone and software-wise is very identical to other recent Nokia smartphones. If you use it closed, it will have almost the same interface but opened will optimize it to use the larger resolution.

For example the active desk will show 8 shortcut icons instead of 6 and the clock will be times bigger. In opened mode, the software keys are top and bottom ones instead of left and right. The main menu is visualized as a grid of 6x3 (animated) icons or as a list. Here the numbers will still act as shortcuts, but in a “bugged” way, oriented based on the numeric keyboard and the 3x4 menu when the phone is closed. If the icons are arranged by default (see the picture) the 0 will go to Download! instead of Web, although the latter is the tenth icon in this menu. As the front keypad has a * and #, the 0 is actually the eleventh button instead of the tenth.

A new extra of the OS (9.2 compared to 9.1) is that each application which is active has a small circle next to its icon in the menu. For example, if you left any application running in the background, than in the main menu next to "Applications" link an indication would appear.

The menu can be personalized by using themes, and if you combine various screensavers and personalized homescreens, two identical phones can look quite different.

Phonebook:

All the contacts are displayed as a list. If there is a picture ID, it can be seen in the top left corner of the screen as a thumbnail with a very small size (it’s the same when you have an incoming call and that’s why we find this feature useless) when you select the contact. If the internal display is used, the right column will display the information on the selected contact but still the CallerID image will be very small. If you want to search, you type in directly from the keypad and searching is done for the whole name (not only the first word), even if the name is saved in more than one field (first and last name for example). If you want to edit a contact , you can only change the already defined fields. For adding more information you need to select the Add Detail menu. When adding a new contact you are provided with the “basic” fields, but with the “Add Detail” function you have almost no restrictions on the fields and their number and you can add a lot of phone numbers.

We also like having the option for adding a given field several times and in that manner for example we are able to record the numbers of three phones each one with a status “Mobile”.

Organizer:

The Organizer is spread into different submenus – the calendar is one of the icons in the main menu and it can be viewed by month or week. Of course, you can easily add notes to a particular day with a few clicks; To-Do notes are also displayed on the homescreen if the corresponding option is turned on (see Interface). An alarm can be assigned to each entry in the calendar.


Other options like Calculator, Notes, and Converter are located in the Office menu. Notes are just annotations with no option for adding an alarm like the To-Do notes. The Converter works with various quantities (Length, Weight, etc.) but the interface has not changed much, compared to older versions, and working with various types is still inconvenient – entering different values requires a quite slow transition from one row to another, while choosing types is done from a drop-down list, which usually takes a lot of time.

The calculator is very simple and is not scientific one, which would suit a smartphone.

Alarms are located in a third menu - Clock (in applications). In Symbian 9.2 you can add as many alarms as you wish and for each one you could choose whether it should repeat each and every day for example or not. This is excellent and there is no stupid limitation in the number of the alarms like with other even smart phones (i.e. Symbian 9.1 allows for only one alarm that even cannot be set to repeat).

The World Clock is also located in this menu and you can add various cities that you like to view – that's very convenient and saves a lot of time compared to the standard way with “moving across the world map". You can easily review given cities, which you are interested in without searching them each time.

The Tools menu houses the integrated File Manager which we would've liked to feature an improved navigation too. Unlike PPC phones, it does not resemble the explorer we know from PCs and working with files is not quite fast.

Nokia has been wise enough to add third party software that comes with every smartphone as that’s a way to broaden the phone’s capabilities – you have QuickOffice and PDF reader which helps you out with the most frequently used document types. Like the N95, the E90 Communicator displayed everything flawlessly. Word text documents, large Excel sheets and PDFs, even heavier presentations in PowerPoint with pictures are easily open. Still, office 2007 documents are not supported by the OpenOffice applications.


The office files are often received with the e-mails archived in series and that is why the phone is supplied with a ZIP manager, which can zip/unzip files. Our remark to it is that it does not handle RAR archives which are also very widespread.

The Search option allows you to search in your Messages/E-mails/Calendar events/To-dos/Notes/Contacts/Other files, which is very convenient. Thus you can find contacts by (part of) a word, coinciding with their profession or company, files in the phone memory, etc. This is an excellent system which must be present in all smart (and not only) phones, but which unfortunately we find in E-series only but not in N (even N95).


As a phone of the E-series, E90 comes with several more extra applications, not available in the other Symbian S60 phones. Teams is an application which makes it easy for you to conduct a conference conversation/send a message or use PushToTalk with a preset group of people differentiated as Team.

The phone has a set of voice commands – they are speaker independent and you don’t have to “train” every command, something that can save you a lot of precious time. By holding the right soft key, the “recognizer” turns on and you can say a name (from the phonebook) to be dialed. Names like “Father”, “Brother”, “test”, “John” and “Neo” were no problem, but we had no success with others like “Amy” for example.

The commands can activate various programs or perform different functions, like “New SMS” for example, but a list with different capabilities must be added to the menu - not all of them are added by default so that they’re easier to recognize with any speaker – thus by adding only the ones you need you can achieve best possible accuracy without the annoying training. Аnd it works, the voice commands were very accurate and we rarely experienced mistakes when launching applications.



A voice recorder can record your voice by the means of speakerphone as the duration of the recording is limited only by the available memory. You can record on the memory card, which will allow longer recording times. In that way the smartphone replaces your voice recorder without needing third party software.

Messaging:

For a phone to function as a mobile office, it must be able to handle messages very well. Like the other Symbian phones, in the Messaging menu you will find everything arranged. By the New Message button you can start writing a text/multimedia or e-mail message. The T9 system can help you input text faster. It works very easy which is typical of Nokia phones.


Inbox is a shared box for the received text and multimedia messages as well as for messages received via Bluetooth. Unlike the N-series, here the headings of the individual letters are visualized by smaller font so that more can be fitted on a single screen. This is so because it is assumed that the business users use/receive lots of messages and should be able to view them faster.

The email is set by means of a Wizard which saves you a lot of writing by automatically ‘completing’ part of the settings. If you know how to configure your e-mail, this will take one to two minutes and then you will be able to use it in your phone. You can preset your phone to download headers only and then a whole message when you want to view it, or download up to a fixed limit (a limit in KB set by you) or directly download the whole letters together with the attached files. We made the settings using the first possibility and downloaded separate messages via WiFi or using the UMTS operator’s net.

Connectivity:

The Nokia E90 Communicator is a quad-band GSM phone, allowing it to work in any network around the globe and use internet connection through EDGE data. When it comes to higher-speed data, the E90 offers 3G (UMTS) and HSDPA, also known as 3.5G. HSDPA is divided into a few classes: up to 1.8Mbps, up to 3.6Mbps and up to 7.6Mbps. The E90 supports the 3.6Mbps which is the second level, but sadly it works only in 2100MHz, so the 3G won’t work in America.

For local connectivity the Communicator offers anything one could expect: wired connection through standard miniUSB, old-school Infrared, Stereo Bluetooth v2.0 + EDR and WiFi (Wireless LAN) 802.11b/g. While rarely someone will use Infrared, the miniUSB and Bluetooth are used for high-speed synchronization and file transfer, between the Communicator and other phones, computers or compatible devices. Keep in mind that in order to achieve high speed data transfers through Bluetooth, both devices must be EDR (Enhanced Data Rate) capable. As A2DP and AVRCP profiles are supported, stereo audio can be transmitted.

After the Nokia PC Suite is installed from the CD in the box, the E90 synchronized with outlook in less than a minute. The software is well done and didn’t cause us any trouble. If you want just to transfer files between the computer and the phone, it can act as mass storage device.

Wi-Fi is very convenient extra for browsing the internet, using local wireless networks as a source of connection. If you are in the range of such network and have access to it, internet can be used independently from the cellular carrier.

Internet:

The Symbian Internet Browser is just brilliant! We like it since we first saw it the first time, but now we love it. It is the most convenient when it comes to small displays but when we use it on the 800-pixels-wide monster, we feel almost as comfortable as on a standard computer, without a mouse but with optimized keyboard-controlled interface. The pages are visualized correctly almost always and the wide display will help you limit the scrolling in horizontal orientation.


Some of the features we like most about the browser are the Minimap which indicates which part of the page is viewed at the moment, after you move around it and the history that shows the last previewed pages when you select the “back” button.

If we compare the E90 to the Toshiba G900 which also has 800 pixels wide display, the Symbian browser feels better than both IE and Opera on the WM-powered Toshiba.

Camera:

Although we’ve seen that Nokia tries to differentiate its series one from another, the E90 features the camera options of the multimedia-targeted N95. This makes us happy and we definitely prefer it to the striped down interface of the E65 for example.

The interface is displayed in landscape mode and the phone is intended to be held with both hands. The right one is used for pressing the shoot button. The various options are displayed in small icons arranged vertically to the right of the screen, so that there's as much space left on the display as possible for the viewfinder. Interesting options are a few scene modes including night photo, night portrait, Sports, Close-up. There's an option for more than one color scenes and white balance, but the latter still lacks manual tuning. The ISO (sensitivity) level can be controlled, but it is not showed in value (50/100/200) but as “low-high”.

The image quality is very impressive for such device! Our sample shots were very close to what we say N95 could accomplish, with the difference being the lower resolution. Overall, the colors a oversaturated making them more vivid. For comparison, the Windows Mobile top of the line model TYTN II which employs camera with the same resolution offers images with times worse quality.

Indoors as long as the light is strong the images will be usable even in full size, but when it is dark the noise is too much. The Flash may help for this, but then the colors are not reproduced correctly.



The built-in camcorder is one of the best found on cameraphone. It is the same as the one of the N95 and the N93(i) and captures in VGA (640x480 pixels) resolution and 30fps. Although the compression makes the quality lower than on any stand-alone camcorder, compared to other phone-videos, these look superb and are definitely usable for online blogging for example.

Nokia E90 sample video at 640x480 pixels resolution

Multimedia:

You can view photos from the memory in the gallery where the files are visualized as a vertical list with small thumbnails. The 3D gallery of the N-series phones is missing here, too, like in E65. The video-clips are viewed in a RealPlayer which has a fullscreen option.

We are disappointed that WMV format is not supported straight out of the box and a video we had didn’t play. Converting it into Real Video 9 (.rmvb file) also didn’t bring us success with 840x496 pixels video. We would like to fill this display resolution but it is hard without third party applications.

The music player is not the one we know from the N-series phones with Symbian 9.2 either, but is quite similar. In the Now Playing interface you can navigate the directions of the d-pad, while information on the played track is visualized below. An image, if any to the music file, is visualized on the left. You have 4 equalizers, bass boost, reverb and stereo widening.

If the internal display is used, the information is slightly rearranged and thanks to the bigger size, the Album Art Cover is much bigger.

You can sort your music by Artists/Albums/Genres/Composers, as well as by Track lists, including most played tracks, Recent tracks, Recent additions.

During music playback, we left the phone opened, sitting on a table. The volume is high and the sound is good for phone speakers but still this is not a portable stereo system. You can enjoy the music in higher quality by attaching headphones to the 2.5mm jack (or a converter to 3.5mm and then standard headphones) or via Bluetooth.

Performance:

Running on 332MHz processor, the E90 acted just as we expected – neither too fast nor too slow. The same processor is used in the N95 and the two smartphones seem to work identically, a step slower than the phones with 369MHz processor and also Symbian 9.2. That OS is very steady and in the testing period restarted just 2 times: once for unknown reason and once after the ‘3d view’ of the GPS software was selected. Keeping in mind we heavily used the phone, this is OK for a smartphone.

No matter how big and vivid the display is, or how many keys the keyboard has, the E90 Communicator is still a phone and it must its performance as such is important. Put in the standard Reception test in an area with gradually decreasing signal, the E90 scored just average 5/10, like the E65.

The battery times are excellent! Nokia claims 5.8 hours of continues talk time but our test exceeded this result and the E90 continued to run for 7 hours. With average usage, a single charge will hold for more than a couple of days, and in our case we charged it daily but with 2.5-3 hours of web-browsing.  This is an excellent result compared to anything currently available on the market. When you have an 800-pixels display and QWERTY you will want to read/write emails and browse the internet and if the battery life doesn’t allow you it will be useless. In this case it is not so and we can consider it as an improvement when compared to the N95, which was blamed for its battery life by many.

We are surprised that the E90 can be used opened during a call. But as nobody would hold it this way next to the head, the loudspeaker must be used in this mode. You will hear with reasonable volume enough for indoors usage, but the other party won’t understand your words even when the phone (microphone) is close to you. Close the shell and continue talking in the normal mode, which offers typical for Nokia close-to-excellent quality. The voices are clear and realistic in both directions and the volume is above the average. It pleases us with business-phone call quality.

Conclusion:

The first reaction when seeing the E90 is that it is HUGE. That’s true, but we can live with this fact, having in mind the features it offers. It reminds of the Ugly duckling – a big and plain phone on the outside, but with huge comfortable keyboard and easy to read display with resolution of 800 pixels on the inside. The combination of the last two turns the E90 Communicator into the ultimate device for internet usage, which thanks to the excellent Symbian S60 browser is visualized as on computer. Add the quad-band GSM, the 3.6MBps HSDPA and the WiFI, and you will see that it can connect almost everywhere. Another smartphone with 800 pixel display is the Toshiba Portege G900 but being a WM6 Pro device is more limited (because of the not popular resolution) and mediocre Internet browser.