Nokia N90: The Ferrari of Cellphones
There’s an old saying that if you have ask the price, then you can’t afford it. Welcome to the Nokia N90. I’ve been carrying this telephone around for a couple of weeks. Everywhere I go it turns heads. People stop to ask about it, and marvel at the things it can do. It’s a darn fine camera that shoots stills and video. It’s a music player. It’s a screamingly fast wireless internet modem. It does email and the web, plays games, and runs miniature versions of all your favorite productivity applications.
Did I mention that it’s also a drop dead gorgeous phone, with large dual colour displays, and gleaming chrome body? It truly is delightful to hold in your hands. And for some, owning this phone will be the equivalent of owning any other fashion accessory — it will be like choosing the right watch, or chain, to go with your ensemble. It’s that pretty.
Industrial Design
In the photo to the left, you can see one of the distinguishing features of this phone – industrial design. It’s like a kids transformer toy. Folded up, it’s just a phone. The hinge, however, contains a camera, with very good Carl Zeiss optics. If you grab that hinge, and twist, the telephone becomes a slick little point and shoot camera. If you then twist it 180 degrees from there, so that the camera and display are pointed at you, it’s a video phone. And if you open the telephone, and then twist the display, it becomes a great little video camera.
The Camera
The camera is no slouch with 2 mega pixel resolution for still shots, VHS quality for video, and Carl Zeiss optics. You can see some of the photos I took with it, below. Image quality is what you would expect from a 2 mega pixel camera, with good colours, good sharpness. The camera itself has a wide range of controls, including white balancing, resolution, and zoom. My only complaint about it was that it is a little slow, which makes it difficult to use in low light, but for well lit, or outdoor settings, it’s excellent.
One of the most surprising things about this camera is the video quality. I shot more than 40 clips with it over the last week. The video camera shot reasonable quality video (certainly good enough for us to preserve a few family memories with), and was consistently able to shoot in lower light conditions than the still camera. The videos are recorded in MP4 format, and can be played back using either RealPlayer, or Quicktime. Because of the MP4 compression I was able to record a respectable 12 minutes of video on the tiny 64M memory card that comes standard with the phone. You can see a sample of that video which I shot on the beach in San Diego.
The one note of caution on video: make sure that you record the video to the MMC card, and not to the (very slow) internal memory on the telephone. Recordings made to the phone memory tend to lose synchronization between video and audio.
Three G: Woo Hoo!
While staying with with my mother-in-law over the Canadian Thanksgiving holiday, I decided to give the 3G modem a whirl. Ruth has no broadband, so I plugged the N90 into my PC, fired up the connection software included with the phone, and was soon surfing the net at 480k/s. It was like having a broadband connection. I’ve often used my RIM Blackberry 7290 for internet connectivity, in a pinch, but never achieved more than 50k/s. This was marvelous.
Rockin’ Out!
Stereo headphones are included with the N90, and it has built in software for processing the music to give richer and better sound. The results are very good. I downloaded a dozen of the free MP3 clips that Amazon provides, and was soon rocking out to Arcade Fire, Moby, and a bunch of other great bands. Go buy a 1G MMC card, and then forget about an iPod. This will do the trick.
Software
A good friend has the following advice: "Never use software from a hardware company". Nokia’s software isn’t too bad, however. The included utilities are quirky, but functional. I was able to move files back and forth between the PC and telephone, synchronize contacts and calendar, and use the modem utility to connect to the internet. Aside from some unusual behaviours (Nokia really needs a usability specialist to go through it), it works as advertised.
The one exception is LifeBlog, Nokia’s photo management application. Although it’s included for free, give this one a pass. It’s slow, buggy, and there are lots of better, free, alternatives out there, like Picasa or Flickr.
What about the phone?
Well, what would you expect from the top vendor of cell phones in the world? It’s great. Great sound, great reception, great battery life, easy to use. It’s just plain, insanely, great.
I have two, minor, complaints. The first is the goofy Nokia cable interface. The entire rest of the industry has gone to USB 2.0 mini plugs. Nokia stubbornly clings to their proprietary cable and charger interfaces, which means that when I travel I have to carry an extra set of cables and chargers, just for the phone.
My second complaint is a little more serious. There is no vibrator. What that means is that this phone can never be my primary phone. I sit in meetings all day long, and can’t have my telephone ringing all the time. It must vibrate. But you know, my wife is going to love this phone, and since she carries her phone in her purse, the vibrator mode doesn’t matter to her.
The Ferrari of Cellphones
Prices haven’t been set yet in North America for this phone. In Europe it goes for something like €750. Like a Ferrari, this phone is a status symbol. It is simply the best at some of the things it does. And, like a Ferrari, some compromises are necessary if you’re going to own one — you can’t take luggage for four in a Ferrari, but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable.
The promise of the N90 is you will have a multimedia communications platform in a pocketable form factor. It delivers in spades, whether you’re talking voice, video, music, or still photographs. And for that, it’s well worth owning.
November 30th, 2005 at 8:48 am
[...] Andy Abramson has set up a blog to track traffic about the Nokia N90 cell phone. There is some major buzz in the blogosphere about this phone. [...]
January 22nd, 2006 at 11:07 pm
[...] Luckily I had my Nokia N90 with me. A quick swap of the SIM to the N90 and I had at least phone service. But no Blackberry Email. And I won’t be back in Canada until January 28th which will be the earliest I can fix the issue. [...]
January 31st, 2006 at 4:54 am
Alec
What can i say that i am part of the Nokia N90 club and have to agree that the abcense of the vibrator along with the absece of a radio really really sucks. You are right heads do turn on seeing the Nokia .
cheers
February 14th, 2006 at 10:13 pm
[...] I came back from DEMO to find a Nokia N70 cameraphone waiting on my doorstep, courtesy of the folks at Comunicano, who run the North American Nokia Blogger Relations program. This is another phone in the Nokia N series, which includes series 60 symbian OS, and high quality optics, as well as a superb phone. I have previously written about the N90, and there’s also a substantial blog devoted to the N90, especially, and the Nokia N Series products, if you want more information. [...]
December 8th, 2006 at 12:31 pm
Alec .. do you kniow the easiest way to find a Nokia N90 in Canada ? Any retailers carry them now, or online ?
Jon
December 8th, 2006 at 3:46 pm
Best spot to look would be EBay. Nobody carries any of the N series phones in Canada.
December 22nd, 2006 at 8:04 am
[...] IP Telephony Marries The Web: Voice 2.0 - A Manifesto For The FutureWe?re witnessing the beginnings of a titanic clash between the Internet and the telecommunications industry. My hope is that clash will be the, albeit painful, evolution of Voice into a full blow internet application - the birth of Voice 2.0. Voice 2.0 is the next step from where we are today. DVD Cover - Clash of the Titans Amazon DVDIn today?s world, VoIP “carriers” like Vonage, Packet8, and the cable offerings, are migrations of thelegacy PSTN onto a VoIP foundation. Voice 2.0 ? true VoIP ? is the marriage of IP Telephony to the Web.It?s already begun. The arrival (and mass adoption) of technologies like Skype, Peerio, and PhoneGnome are one indicator. Another is the accelerating loss of landline business amongst incumbent carriers. In the first quarter of this year, North American landline attrition doubled. As I write this today, landline cancellations have reached 10,000 per day, as customers opt for cable, mobile, or VoIP solutions over services from traditional providers.What will that world look like? Who will be the winners, the losers, the moneymakers? What will the consumer experience be?Follow along with me, and let?s have a closer look. This essay is part fiction, and part reality. It?s a whole lot of what I would like to see in the communications platform of the future, which I have dubbed Voice 2.0. Voice 2.0: A Manifesto for the FutureTalk is the BaselineIn a typically Scandinavian understatement, Skype founder Niklas Zennstrom?s rationale for why Skype is so successful was this: “People like to talk“. People do like to talk. As communications services have become ever cheaper, the explosion of usage has been remarkable. For instance, according to the FCC, between 1994 and 2001, average minutes of wireless usage per month climbed from 140 minutes per month per user, to 427 minutes per month per user. Over the same period of time, annual US land line usage grew from 2.8 trillion to 4.8 trillion minutes. Prices fell, usage skyrocketed.The merger of talk with the web is the foundation of Voice 2.0. When Skype launched, and the price of minutes dropped to zero, social barriers to calling strangers disappeared, driving voice usage higher again. The merger of talk and the web is leading to web-based conferencing, push to talk, application sharing, voice enabled e-commerce, and a multitude of other applications, all of which are driving voice usage higher. In the process this merger is redefining the staples of business ? customer service, sales, andmarketing ? and impacting all of our lives as we move from the standard work day to 24/7 availability.Talk is the baseline, but that baseline will be combined with text / IM messaging, and video. Today?s networks can support the technologies. The evolution to full blown, multimedia, real-time communications is just a matter of time. Some products, like the Nokia N90 cellular telephone, are already providing this capability. Nokia?s E Series telephones will also have built in SIP clients, facilitating a seamlessly mobile VoIP world.As speculative fiction writer William Gibson said, “The future is already here, it?s just unevenly distributed.” It begins with talk.The Meter is OffPhoto credit: Zoom ZoomVoice will be free, as the Skypers contend, and the Stupid Network model implies. Short term, all you can eat models, like Vonage, will exist, but long term it?s clear that the metered model is dead. The point-to-point technology called VoIP neither requires, nor facilitates the metering of traffic. Metered access to mediated access networks, like the PSTN, will continue only so long as customers require access to those networks to talk. Currently, the only widespread metered model in VoIP is metered access from the IP network to the PSTN. But how long before the majority of customers are on the IP network, and the model reverses? When will we see PSTN customers pay a premium to contacttheir friends on VoIP networks?In the Voice 2.0 world, there will be three billable entities: connectivity [...]
February 17th, 2008 at 11:15 am
[...] crop of devices is that it really shows how far Nokia’s strategy has progressed. When I first wrote about the N90 in 2005, state of the art was a 2 megapixel camera. Its music capabilities were good, but the [...]