Nokia E90 Communicator Review

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.