Review: Nokia N90 - Camera Phone Brilliance
The Nokia N90, a brilliant new tri-band GSM/EGPRS (900/1800/1900 MHz) smartphone, is the perfect upgrade for users who have found a serious purpose - or just a real love - for phone photography. Besides its unique multi-fold form factor, the most noteworthy thing about the N90 is the breakthrough features of its still/video camera.
At the time Nokia announced U.S. availability of the N90, in November, it was not saying which carriers would be selling it. Since then, it has been released for T-Mobile's network.
The handset started selling at some Ritz Camera stores and online at ritzcamera.com late last month for an estimated street price of $400 with activation. Since then Nokia has made the N90 available through retail stores like CompUSA and the Neiman Marcus holiday gift catalog.
The Smartphone Gamut
The Symbian OS, S60 (formally Series 60) platform N90 offers the full scope of multimedia smartphone applications—synchronization with PC calendar, contacts and todo applications (via USB, Bluetooth or IR), push e-mail that supports attachments, WAP Web browsing, multimedia messaging (including the ability to send messages with a combination of image, video and sound clip), video telephony (in high-speed UMTS coverage areas)—'plus relatively high-quality photography and very impressive videography.
It also has some nice input/output features, such as predictive text input, voice dialing, a speaker phone and support, Nokia claims, for Bluetooth keyboards.
Worth Thousands of Words
But it is the camera features that grab attention.
The sensor is 2 megapixels (1600 x 1200 pixels), which is as good as phone cameras get. Unlike every other model we've tested, this one is not fixed focus, but autofocus. When you press the shutter button, the lens actually focuses the image. Instead of very fuzzy pictures most of the time, you get reasonably sharp pictures most of the time.
The lens is from Car Zeiss, a legendary German optics firm that also makes lenses for dedicated digicams such as those from Sony. Note that this does not mean the N90 lens is of the same quality as the lenses in Sony's cameras.
It very clearly is not and it would be unreasonable to expect it to be. This does mean, however, that the lens is slightly better than the those found in many other phone cameras, and this is borne out in the test pictures I shot.
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N90 - Carl Zeiss Optics Camera Phone
The camera also boasts a 20X digital zoom capability, but don't be fooled. This has nothing to do with the lens.
Digital zoom just means you take a portion of the image in the center so that your subject appears closer. It's like cropping the picture in the camera; the more you zoom in, the smaller the picture you get.
The other really important feature is the tiny integrated electronic flash unit which doubles as a floodlight when you're shooting video. It illuminates subjects in flash mode at up to about five feet.
It's also possible to adjust flash mode: on, off, automatic and red-eye. Including an integrated flash is not an absolutely unique feature—the Hewlett-Packard iPaq hw6515 Mobile Messenger has one, for example—but it is still rare in camera phones. The dedicated shutter button is also, while not unique, unusual, and very welcome.
The camera even offers five program shooting modes that automatically adjust settings for scenery, portrait, night, sports and landscape subjects.
While N90 certainly took the best pictures we've seen from a camera phone, it still doesn't come close to the quality you get from even the least expensive dedicated digital cameras; most of which today are 4 megapixels.
The N90 pictures aren't as big or as sharp, you don't get as many colors, the colors are not as true to nature, and you'll see more noise.
They look perhaps slightly better than the quality you got from a 2-megapixel dedicated camera from eight years or so ago. Given that the camera is included in a phone this small, with all the other features, it's pretty impressive.
Click for larger image
Video
The video is in some ways even more impressive.
The N90 captures video in MP4 format (MPEG-4 video, AAC-LC audio) and CIF resolution (352 x 288 pixels). On our 19-inch, 1280 x 1024 pixel resolution PC display, this works out to a screen size of 4 x 3.5 inches.
Motion is fairly smooth, the image detail surprisingly good. Color in normal room light or winter window light - augmented by the N90's tiny floodlight - looks a bit washed out.
Design
The N90's brilliantly original form factor is designed around the camera.
It works something like a clamshell phone, but has a third section to which the keypad unit (the bottom) and the display unit (the top) are both hinged. This third section, like the spine of a book, houses the lens, flash and, presumably, some of the camera electronics.
Like many recent clamshell phones, the N90 has two LCDs.
The main display, on the inside of the top section, is a 2.1 inches (352 x 416 pixels) active matrix screen with 262,144 colors and an automatic brightness control that adjusts brightness according to ambient light. The mini display on the outside surface is a (128 x 128 pixels) active matrix screen with 65,536 colors.
The camera section twists through about 315 degrees, so you can take pictures around corners and sneaky pictures that look like you're shooting in one direction when you're actually shooting in another. You can also shoot yourself—especially useful for video telephony or sending video mail of yourself saying, 'I wuv you.'
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N90 - Twist & Shoot
With the phone folded, twisting the camera assembly from the rest position automatically launches the N90 camera software—assuming the unit is powered on. The mini display becomes your viewfinder.
And you use the joystick, located below the capture (shutter) button on the outside edge of the bottom (keyboard) section, to change settings: to select shooting mode (automatic, close-up, etc.), flip the view, turn on the self-timer, adjust exposure values, select image quality (print, e-mail, multimedia message) and choose where to store the pictures (memory or storage card).
You can also use the camera with the N90 partially unfolded so that the top and bottom sections are at right angles. The top section is divided into two segments—the part that hinges to the camera assembly and the part that houses the LCDs.
With the N90 unfolded, the LCD segment swivels through about 110 degrees. This automatically switches the unit to camera mode and allows you to hold it comfortably and steadily low against your body and look down at the large LCD, which is now your viewfinder. Or you could twist the components to hold the camera high and look up at the viewfinder to see over heads.
When using the camera in this configuration, adjustments can be made using both the joystick and the context sensitive buttons above the display.
Editing
As well as being a pretty decent still-video camera, the N90 also comes with a surprisingly full-featured image editing program that lets you crop, rotate, resize, adjust contrast and brightness, sharpen, add text, clip art or a border and apply special effects (sepia tone, black and white, cartoonize). The image editor is part of the N90's suite of photo-video software.
The product also comes with a separate movie editor from muvee Technologies Pte. Ltd. The muvee technology recently won Best of Show at Portable Media Expo.
Software that ships with the N90 will automatically make a movie from your still pictures with motion, add-in graphics and music, or let you string together video clips to make a movie. The still images in muvee movies don't look to be quite a bit lower resolution, but you're only meant to view them on the phone.
Phone
The N90 is more than a still-video camera, of course. The basic functions all worked very well in our testing. Voice calls were strong and clear. WAP Web browsing, using the T-Mobile portal, was fast even in roaming mode on Canada's Rogers Wireless's GPRS network.
E-mail set-up was straightforward and trouble-free, although painstaking as usual when entering the alpha characters of a long incoming mail server name on the numeric keypad. The e-mail connection through T-Mobile's t-zones portal seemed faster than with most we've tested.
The "push" mail is really just timed retrieval of mail. You can set it up to collect messages as frequently as every 30 minutes.
Without access to a UMTS network, we weren't able to test video telephony, but multimedia messaging worked as well or better than other products we've tested.
The Nokia PC Suite includes back-up, synchronization, file manager, multimedia viewing and other functions. It installed without problem on our Windows XP PC. Setting up a connection between PC and phone using the Microsoft Bluetooth receiver for my wireless keyboard and mouse worked well after a couple of false starts.
The initial synchronization of our 3,000+ record contact database was very slow—it should have been done over the USB cable—but sending pictures and even videos over Bluetooth was very fast and very convenient.
Downsides?
The N90 takes an age to boot up, almost a minute. You'll want to leave it on most of the time. And although the specifications say it supports a Nokia branded Bluetooth keyboard, it's not clear if it will pair with any others. I was unable to get it to pair with a ThinkOutside Stowaway Universal Bluetooth Keyboard.
Bottom line: this is one of the best multimedia smartphones we've seen. Highly recommended.
Review: Nokia N90 - Camera Phone Brilliance
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