Nokia N90 Review

Published by Ewan Spence at 10:48 GMT, December 13th 2005 under Hardware in Series 60
Classic management strategy is to form something, and then (brain)storm it to improve the product. With the N-Series phones, Nokia is clearly out of the forming stage and into the storming. With the N90, a design team has sat down and decided to make the best camera phone possible. Have they succeeded?

Nokia N90Let's start at the very outside. A quick word about the N90's packaging, which is something that is not normally mentioned. It’s gorgeous. The phone itself is on display in the blister pack, with all the features that Nokia are proud of highlighted on the rear of the box. There’s a twin opening feature, and it makes the first few moments of the ‘user experience’ very nice.

The first thing that strikes you about the N90 once it’s in your hand is the sheer size of the unit. Sure it packs a lot into the frame, but compared to the svelte forms of some of the ‘budget’ phones you can get on contract for free nowadays, the N90 better have something to back up its bulk. Luckily, it does. The big selling point of the N90 is that it’s a camera phone. Now I know that this term has been thrown about a lot in the last few years, but the N90 is probably the first device to really live up to the promise.

The optics are the most prominent feature of this focus on being a camera (and yes, the pun was intended). With Carl Zeiss optics in the phone and being mentioned in every advert and press release, Nokia are rightly making a big thing of this. What’s great, from an end user point of view, is that all the powered auto-focus equipment operates without any user interaction – that’s why it’s called Auto-focus – and the resulting pictures are some of the best from a 'phone'.

But what gets people most about the N90 isn’t the fancy lens, but the fact that it is a transformer. While you might be giggling at visions of little toy cars turning into robots, you’re pretty close with the N90. Spinning the camera barrel while closed gives you something very close to a regular camera. Flip up the screen and you can switch to ‘handheld’ mode, which is primarily for video but also works as a good full screen camera mode as well. Finally whip everything back into place and you have a fully featured flip phone.

It makes for a very tactile phone, one that you are more than happy to lift out and just open and close all the time. I find myself idly spinning the camera barrel around. What I did find was a problem with the design when trying to put it into my trouser pockets. If I put the phone in with the camera barrel going in first, it spins round a touch and this makes it really awkward to get in the pocket. Invariably it would be lifted out and turned over 180 degrees. The second problem is the battery cover. I’m glad I’m not alone in this – it’s virtually impossible to get off the device due to the incredibly tight fit. Once it was open, I resorted to a tiny tab of sticky tape to make sure I could get back into it again while reviewing it. It might not be as much of a concern to people using it as their only phone, but it lets down the overall “first few minutes” experience.