yazeez

Meet Cesc. The newest member of my family . Probably the most complete member of the family. I love this phone, loooove it. I heard about it back in January, but I thought it was just a rumor to get back at the iphone. But in February, the spy pics, and official pics came out, and I wanted one ever since.

Been using it for about 2 months now, and I am wondering why the hell did I wait so long. Hands down the best phone I ever used. I had 2 previous communicators (the 9500 and the 9210) both were buggy, slow, and a punch of other problems, but the E90 is in a whole new ball game. It does have its hiccups (crashed a few times while browsing certain pages, i.e sky sports, and another website that I don’t recall), but it is fast, has a lot more RAM than you would need (you can leave all your apps open and not worry about slowing it down).

Nokia moved the E90 to run on S60 platform, which has a lot more 3rd party applications and more stable than the S80 (in the 9500). Also for the first time, the outer and inner screen all run the same OS, switching between both screens is almost seamless and extremely practical. A feature that I love!

As with all new phones these days, this is a 3G phone. Surfing the net over 3G is ultra fast (I am on Mobily), it connects right away, the speeds which this phone can handle was also impressive, its a full 3.6 mbps modem (connected it to the laptop as a modem, did a bandwidth test and got 3.1 mbps!!, but it was early, real early in the morning).

I am also experimenting with VoIP over 3G. I found a few companies that provide applications that run on the phone, while others let you import settings from a good number of VoIP providers. I am trying out a few companies that offer good prices. I am looking for god quality calls, and I wanna know how much bandwidth it uses.

GPS is a handy feature that they put it. Although the time to get a fixed signal varies (between 1-5 minutes, only if you are outside, never got a fix unless inside, unless its near a window). The Nokia Maps application is really good. It has a lot of handy features. You can use it to get directions, if the area you are in is very detailed (with Jubail, it is not that detailed, Khobar and Dammam are very detailed, the same for Kuwait and Bahrain, you can search for restaurants, hotels, etc etc). Live navigation is available, but you have to upgrade to get that. The new firmware, which is coming out soon, should add A-GPS (assisted gps), which should really cut down on the time the phone needs to get a fix. (A-GPS is already available on the N95, it came with the last firmware update). Google has recently come out with Google Maps Mobile. The only thing it adds to the use of GPS on the phone is the ability to view satellite images (it does have the normal Google maps features, but Google maps doesn’t really cover our part of the world really well.) But its extremely accurate. I tried it out while I was in my room, got a GPS fix near the window, opened the application, switched to satellite view, zoomed in to our house, and it actually had a blue dot, showing my location relative to where my room in the house is, and it was ACCURATE. (It also impressed a lot of people, who saw this and to them, it justified the high price of the phone )

Browsing webpages on the internal screen is the best I have ever experienced on any phone, even the iPhone. 95% of all the webpages I visited are fully displayed on the 800×352, 4 inch internal screen (which is BRIIIGHT!). I liked the features that the browser the 9500 had, like opening a new window on your own, copying paste from the web, and other small things, that are not yet available on the E90. Maybe the firmware (or future ones) will address this, or someone will build a browser specifically for the E90 (opera browser maybe?). Here’s an interesting note; the new browser is based on Apple’s safari browser, while the old one was based on Mozilla . Oh and I just found out that you can access the webapps made for the iphone too.

The camera is not bad, not really important to me, thats why I got Dennis . Its pretty decent for pics on the go. (its a 3.2mp camera). The video quality is impressive though. It can take videos at 640×480 at 30fps, which is DVD quality, so you cant really complain there.

The keyboard is really easy to type with, it didn’t take me that long to get used to. The keypad on the outside is also quite good. The only problem I have with something “pressable” is the camera shutter, this seems to be common with other E90 users.

The build quality is much much much better than the previous commies. Two stainless steel hinges replace the crappy plastic ones that were on the 9500. Almost everyone I knew who had a 9500, had one or both of the hinges broken at some time. Plus these new hinges make the phone fold to 180 degrees and make it look good too. Other areas of the phone also seem to be very durable. 2 months and I have no scratches on it, well not anything big anyways (I literally spent a few minutes looking for them ). Plus its Cesc-si!

The battery life is good for a day’s use. If you are a heavy user like me, then you should charge it whenever you can, I tend to abuse it sometimes. If you go through one day with minimal web browsing, and the “normal” amount of phone calls etc, it should last you 2 days. But if constantly browsing, checking email, gps, etc, then good luck I am thinking of getting a second battery (although the battery has never died on me yet), or get one of these.

Oh and I can forward SMS, send them to more than one person, and even send MMS and much much more. (for non iphone users, i am being sarcastic, for iphone users, i kid you not! you can actually do that)

Bottom line: If you need a phone to make phone calls, this is not for you, if you need something that could do pretty much everything else, then this is for you.

(this whole post, from the uploading of the image, formatting the text, links, and everything was done using Cesc)