Nokia E90 Communicator Review

Name: Nokia E90 Communicator
Brand: Nokia

By PhoneArena Team

Updated: Sep 09, 2008, 10:20 AM

4comments

Nokia

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.

The box contains:

Nokia E90
Charger
Wired handsfree
512MB microSD card
USB cable
DVD with software
User manual

We are greatly disappointed that the box doesn’t include a carrying case, which will allow you to attach the phone and wear it on the belt. As it is huge in size, wearing in pocket may be a problem …

If you’ve seen the previous Communicators, you would know what to expect – a huge “brick-like” candybar phone. It is one of the biggest in size recently announced phones but that is a must, considering the capabilities it packs. It fits OK in the hand, but wearing in a pocket is a problem due to its size and you can forget about putting it in a shirt’s pocket.

The heavy weight is the reason to easily feel the phone with you, but as it is extremely well built, it gives the feeling of a high-tech device.

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

It gets bigger when you open it but this allows for housing the huge display and keyboard. Opening is done at two levels – first the display “locks” at 90 degrees towards the bottom part, which will be suitable for previewing of video file for example. If you will type text holding the phone in your hands, it must be fully opened, with the display and the keyboard sitting flat.

Being fully usable phone when it is closed, the E90 houses the standard combination of a display and keypad on the front. The 2” display is with QVGA (240x320 pixels) resolution and 16 million colors just like other Nokia smartphones. It is bright unit with balanced colors and excellent DPI (dots per inch) ratio. Outdoors with directly reflecting bright sunlight, the colors vanish and it gives greenish image, reminding of a grayscale display. Still, remains perfectly readable.

The keypad also occupies small part of this side and this makes the keys average in size and tightly next to each other. If your fingers are big, two keys may press at the same time when in a hurry. Still, the step-like arrangement (thanks to the relief) makes them feel easily and as they press softly and with tactile feedback the keyboard is more than usable.

The heavy texting crowd will be happy to find the QWERTY keyboard inside. It occupies 4 times larger surface, needed to fit so many keys. They are arranged in 5+1 rows, differentiated one from other thanks to the relief. The bottom 4 rows are for the letters and the characters, the fifth is for the numbers and the top one is with large shortcuts, as a whole very similar to a computer keyboard. The separate row for keys makes input of numbers much easier than if they are as alternatives, as on most Windows Mobile phones. The buttons press easily and with strong feedback but unlike most situated on a slider, the keys have bigger movement which feels softer on pressing. We think this helps for more convenient typing when it comes to large amount of text. Still like other wide keyboards one has to move his fingers over the phone when typing, which isn’t so with smaller keyboard like the one of the Q9h.

As we’ve said earlier, like a computer keyboard, the E90 has sixth row with shortcuts that will do what the name says – open a dedicated menu. The end left and right columns house keys including Ctrl (Control), Arrow (Shift), Chr (Character or Alt), Tab, Backspace and Enter. Here also are My Own (the second dedicated shortcut) and backlight on/off buttons. The combination of Chr+Tab will act as Alt+Tab on a Windows Computer – scroll through application loaded in the RAM memory. As on any other Symbian S60 phone, this can be done by holding the Menu button which is at the right end of the top row, next to the My Own button. About a dozen of keys have blue alternative characters on them, which means they will act as shortcuts. Pressing the key together with the Chr will perform the action.

The internal display is a 3.9” wide-angle monster unit that will increase the resemblance with a laptop. It is also pretty bright, but in order to save battery power we prefer to decrease the illumination. This can be done in seconds thanks to one of the shortcuts described above (Chr + Bulb button) which will change the 5 levels of the display brightness. The same key without the Chr will turn on/off the keyboard brightness, also performed for battery saving. The big screen is superb for previewing of videos and images and excellent for text and internet, where the 800x352 pixels resolution will show its advantages. 800 pixels width means you will open a lot of the internet pages without any or just with a minor scrolling in this orientation, which is huge advantage over QVGA displays which are more than 2 times narrower in resolution. Just like the external display, the internal one loses its color but remains perfectly readable in direct sunlight.

Right side

Let’s go back to the exterior and see what else the phone has. Unlike a lot of the contemporary smartphones which have a myriad of buttons positions on its sides, the E90 is limited to two shortcuts on the right and an Infrared eye. The upper button is the Voice Commands shortcut that is felt and pressed hard, while the lower one is raised and is for the camera but is not a shortcut, but just shutter key. Although autofocus is supported, the button is not two-stepped and after holding it for a few seconds it focuses and captures consecutively. As volume-control keys are lacking, the volume is adjusted by the D-pad.

The bottom houses the miniUSB connector, the Nokia charger port, 2.5mm stereo jack and the microphone hole. Strangely, there are two pins between the charger and the 2.5mm ports, which should be used with a Desk-stand charger, but yet Nokia has to introduce one for the E90.

On the back are the camera and the LED flash. Rubber feet are positioned in the four corners, on which the phone “sits” when put on a table. They raise it a little so the music is played louder through the speakers, although they are on the back. The feet will be comfortable when you leave the phone watching a video for example, but are not good for typing on it. The E90 is designed to be held in the hand while you use it, otherwise is very uncomfortable to press the buttons.

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.

GPS:

Nokia E90 Communicator features built-in GPS navigation system, just like the N95. It uses the same software and probably hardware (Nokia doesn’t give information on it), which is the worst such solution we have tested. This negative opinion is due to the performance of the GPS chip – the first postion lock (cold restart) takes times

more than on other devices (for example TyTN II with gpsOne or Eten M700 with SirfStar III) but we may live with this if it wasn’t the slow hot restart. The above-mentioned devices need 10 seconds for it while the E90 takes 30 seconds in the best case and most of the time even 1-5 minutes, based on where you are.

Once it acquires its positions, the GPS offers decent performance during our in-town tests.

Preloaded E90 Communicator comes with the free version of the Nokia’s own software for navigation. Still, it may be used with other applications. An up-to-date version of Route 66 can be used with the device: it works with the built-in GPS and visualizes correctly on the large internal display. Unfortunately it is not the case with the popular TomTom6 – even its latest version doesn’t support the built-in GPS. An upgrade that will fix this issue is expected soon, but in order to be really used with the E90, the new version should also be optimized for various screen resolutions, as at the moment when the phone is opened (the big screen is used) the applications is unusable, due to totally incorrect visualization.

The Nokia Maps software is based on smart2go and it has versions both for Symbian S60 phones and for Windows Mobile Pocket PCs. This full-features software allows both localizing and route planning and searching for Points of Interest. All maps for the 150 supported countries are free, while only turn-by-turn directions and extended Point of Interest information called City Guides are paid. The Turn by Turn navigation is purchased only once, while you can order City Guides for different cities.

If you decide to purchase the extras, you can do that directly from you phone. Using the Internet connection, you can view (after you have searched for them) maps of places, which are not saved on your phone’s memory. Actually, E90 works autonomously in offline mode, but Nokia recommends that you have an Internet connection, so that the software can download the route whenever it decides to do so.

If for example you go to Dallas, TX and you didn't pre-install Texas map, the E90 will connect via an available data connection and will download only the area where you are traveling in Dallas and not Houston, El Paso etc. This way you only download what you need, and not the full Texas map which could be larger and would take time to download.

After calculating the ‘route’ from point A to point B, the software will show you a text, telling you where and when to take a turn. You can see the Route graphically on the map for better orientation and if you have bought the Turn by Turn navigation, it will localize you and will tell you when to take a turn. There is an option for voice navigation, which, thanks to the good speakers, is easy to understand and is heard well.

Software:

Nokia E90 is one of the few Symbian phones coming without any preloaded games. As it is a smartphone, any application written for S60 over Symbian 9.2 should work on it. As the E90 is the only S60 phone with such resolution of its internal display, most application should work, but there will be some that will not. Those which use the OS interface should have no problems as it adapts to the size, but the ones that use own environment (Games or heavy apps like the ones for GPS Navigation) must be optimized. We tried to Install Fring, to work with Skype, but we got an error message that it is not compatible with the phone. Agile Messenger installed with no problem, but using in on the internal display resulted in mismatching of the soft keys – the bottom one acted instead of the top and vice verse. TomTom6 didn’t visualized correctly at all, but was OK on the external display.

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.