The Phone

Hardware-wise, the N90 feels solid. The fit and finish is superb. Buttons and screen and swivel joints all feel robust. It's a pretty fashionable phone as well, what with its hip mix of black and chrome. Fingerprints aren't much of a problem, thankfully, so you won't constantly feel a need to polish it. Overall, it feels great in my hand, but seems a bit big in my pocket. I'm used to flatter and wider phones, whereas the N90 is more brick-shaped when closed (its overall shape reminds me of the old disposable 110 cameras).

The N90's two screens are very bright and easy to read. The external 1.5" (diag.) display has a color resolution of 128 x 128 and is great for getting alerts when the phone is closed as well as use as a viewfinder when taking photos -- great double-duty use.

The internal (main) display is a bit small at 2.1" (diag.) for a media-centric phone (in my opinion), but it has an absolutely brilliant resolution (352 x 416). This makes photo viewing a nice experience. However, the OS uses the screen's real estate very inefficiently, with many missed opportunities to show a lot more information than it actually does. This creates lots of added scrolling through lists of unseen options (as the screen cap below shows...can't I see more than 3 pieces of info about Abe at a time without scrolling??).

Use as a phone is decent, although I still don't understand why phone makers insist on burying the ability to silence the phone in a menu structure. On the N90, it requires hitting the power button, toggling the joystick down three positions, and clicking again to confirm. For comparison, on the Treo (sorry), all you have to do is slide a physical button and it's 100% quiet -- that's smart. At least you can silence the N90 without opening it...there is a silver lining.

PC Synchronization

Setup on my PC was a bit disappointing. The connection software -- Nokia PC Suite -- only syncs to Outlook, Outlook Express, Lotus Notes, and Lotus Organizer. I don't use any of those, and PC Suite itself doesn't offer a PIM interface. Frankly, in my opinion, Nokia PC Suite is a confusing kludge of applets -- it attempts to be activity-centric, but ends up presenting a chaotic mess of options with no clear direction. Maybe it's just my lack of familiarity, but I think a lot of UI designers would have a hard time praising its interface.

Nokia PC Suite also did not make it easy for me to migrate my contact data from a device other than a Series 60 phone. It wouldn't handle that mass vCard export that Palm Desktop produced, so I was limited to just pulling over a handful of contacts one at a time (export vCard, save, drag to PC Suite, confirm, repeat). If Nokia wants to capture additional market share with the N90, especially going after media-centric users, it should really rethink its desktop experience. After all, the PC is where many folks store most of their digital media.

Photography

One of the main functions the N90 is supposed to serve, apart from being a phone, is as a camera. Its Carl Zeiss lens with 2MP (1600 x 1200 resolution) sensor is fairly serious fare for a phone (at least outside Asia, where any phone camera with less than 3MP is to be publicly mocked and derided). So, how does it do? I'll let you be the judge. Here is a fairly typical phonecam photo: my daughter indoors at close range, with flash (click the thumbnail for the original full-size image).

As you can see, it's a decent photo for a phone, but I wasn't convinced it was anything special compared to even a mediocre dedicated camera. The red-eye is terrible (not surprising given that the flash is a 1/4 inch away from the lens) and the noise in the picture is quite noticeable. Checking the EXIF data reveals that the shot was taken at 1/20th of a second at ISO 800. So how exactly would this camera react in a dark environment like, say, a pub or nightclub? Not well, I expect. But how does it compare to other cameras?

With these thoughts in mind, I decided to take the same photo with all the imaging devices I had on hand, with the results shown in the table below. Each row shows one of the four imaging devices, in order of increasing megapixelage (a Treo 650, the Nokia N90, a Canon S1 IS point-and-shoot camera, and a Konica Minolta Maxxum 5D digital SLR). The image in the left column of each row is a thumbnail (click to see the original full-sized image) and the image in the right column of each row is a 300x200 crop of the full-sized image (the only manipulation of the original images posted here are for the Maxxum 5D shots -- at 5 megs apiece, they were a bit unwieldy, so I resaved them at JPG quality 90%, which brought them down to ~800KB apiece and didn't really damage image quality terribly).

	Thumbnail (click for full image)	Full-size center crop
Treo 650 -- .3MP
Nokia N90 -- 2MP -- no flash
Nokia N90 -- 2MP -- with flash
Canon S1 IS -- 3.1MP -- no flash
Canon S1 IS -- 3.1MP -- with flash
Minolta Maxxum 5D -- 6MP -- no flash
Minolta Maxxum 5D -- 6MP -- with flash

This was a tough test -- I used a combination of incandescent and halogen lamps to light the room, and the objects themselves weren't lit directly. The N90's color accuracy seems OK (to my uncalibrated eyeball -- the Canon S1 IS with flash seems to be the most accurate), although I've noticed that the flash can give the image a blue tint if the subject is close (as in the close-up of Sam above). Thankfully, the N90 gives a fair range of control over the imaging function -- not SLR-level control, but scene mode, flash mode, white balance, exposure compensation, and color effects are all easily adjusted.

I did notice that the N90 jumps to really high ISO levels (640 and 1000, with and without flash respectively), which greatly enhances the noise. Lots of pixels on really small sensors do not typically result in low-noise images anyway, and ISO 1000 certainly isn't going to help. Take a look at the full-sized N90/no flash image -- you'll notice big blue blobs in the otherwise homogeneously burgundy carpeting. I haven't found a way in the N90 to set the ISO level, so that may be an uncontrollable factor.

My initial reaction, being the image quality snob I am, is that I'd much rather toss one of the crop of new, tiny, deck-of-playing-cards-sized 5MP+ cameras (e.g., the miniscule Canon SD450 or teensy Nikon Coolpix S2) in my pocket if I thought I would want to take some decent stills or some high-quality (VGA @ 30fps) movies (the N90's movies are limited to 352x288).

But, I'm not ready to throw in the towel on the N90 yet -- I think I may just need some more time with it to figure out how to get the best photos out of it. Besides, since it's a phone, it's always with me, unlike a dedicated camera (which I rarely seem to have when I most want it).

More to come...