The Nokia N93 Mobile Phone

(my impressions after the first couple of days owning it)

Let's start with a famous quote:

"Perfection is reached, not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away."

Antoine de Saint-Exupery

If you take this wise quote seriously, then the Nokia N93 is probably the least perfect phone ever, the embodiment of imperfection. You could take away about 50 features like the photoflash-that-is-also-a-pocket-lamp, the UMTS video conferencing capabilities, the Flickr export capabilities, the viewers for Microsoft office documents, and you would still have a perfectly fine mobile phone.

And the quote is right, the huge and bulky N93 is far away from being aesthetically pleasing, and its huge feature count does come with a huge bug count and a huge amount of spending time looking for that feature that you've activated by chance and want to deactivate again.

But if you're reading this, chances are that you're googling for information about the N93, which means that you are probably considering buying this beast, which probably also means that you're a technology-driven person who will sacrifice beauty for horsepower. Okay, here we go, the N93's horsepower in terms of cool features and how I like them:

Display: the N93 has a huge display with a very nice resolution of 320x200 (like my old Amiga back then :-) ). The display is bright and tremendeously good to read. This holds particularly when I'm using the phone outside on bright, sunny days. Other than all mobile phones I've owned before, the display can be read perfectly well in direct sunlight, and it's actually looking great then. No more trying to get some shade falling on the display in order to make out who's calling.

Ring Tones: apart from the standard Nokia profiles with separate ring tones you can have caller-specific ring tones, you can organize callers into groups and have group specific ring tones, you can set up the phone to say (with synthesized robot speech) the name of the caller while ringing, and of course you can download any MP3 files to the phone as ring tone.

Camera: the N93's camera is probably its most prominent feature. With 3.1 Megapixels, a 3x optical zoom and a Zeiss lens it should be able to deliver the quality you get from lower range digital cameras. This was actually the one of the reasons I bought the N93 - the opportunity of always being able to take a halfway reasonable photo. Do you also remember a lot of situations where you've been in e.g. the most amazing sunset, unable to take a picture? Not anymore with the N93 :-). But does it live up to what it promises? Yes and no. Yes, the pictures it delivers have a 3.1 MP resolution of 2048x1536. Also, in good light conditions, these pictures are, at first glance, quite okay. If you look closer, you'll observe very prominent artefacts, massive purple fringing, and the photo just doesn't look nice and clean as those taken with real cameras do.

a detail of a N93 photo. See how the white areas are not white but speckled with artefacts?

purple fringes, artefacts, and all kinds of issues can be seen in these leafs.

Additional camera features: the night mode leads to a horrible level of noise, about two levels higher than what you get in the highest level of a normal digital camera. You need an excellent noise removal tool to turn them into something you can use (but then there's Noise Ninja). There's also a flash, but I've not yet tried it out too much. And finally, the camera features a good but very slow (2 secs?) auto focus.

Having seen these issues, my first impression after only a dozen or so pictures taken is that
a) yes, there's a powerful camera built into the N93
b) yes, this camera can be used to take photos of a low but acceptable quality.
c) you need a noise removal tool and a good image manipulation tool to improve the picture's quality, and even then you can get to the moment of frustration when you realize that this time you had a camera with you when you ran into something spectacular you just needed to take a photo of, but the photo has just turned bad.

With this in mind, my conclusion of the N93's camera is actually very positive: although it can not compete with even a low-level digital camera, it's a real camera ready for taking real photos in an acceptable resolution. And if I've before missed 95% of the opportunities to take a great shot I'll now miss about 0%, and I'll even have a good photo afterwards in about 40% of the cases. That's quite an improvement :-).

Video Camera: supposedly very good, also with Adobe something Elements video manipulation software included, but I've not tried it out as I'm not so much into taking videos.

Let's come to the next section...

Networking: yes, you can connect this camera to quite everything, in at least five different ways.

• Infrared: works fine, as with most cameras.
  
• Bluetooth: works perfectly well, was able to set up a bluetooth connection between my notebook and my camera in 5 minutes and to transfer a song without any problem.
• WLAN: works, but is more tricky than I'd want to have it. You see, I can get it to connect to my WPA protected Airport WLAN by always selecting "WLAN" when starting a tool, and always typing the password again. But setting up an access point just does not work, and I've not yet found any other way to avoid typing that password again and again each time I want to browse the web or check my e-mail. Oh well.
• USB: connect the USB cable that came with the phone to your PC or Mac, and you get several good options to synchronize your N93 with the computer, from the easy "N93 as an external disk, like a card reader" to a highly advanced PC software suite that enables you to sync your data. As expected from USB2, the connection is fast enough to even sync large music libraries.
  
• UMTS: I consider that as a "nice thing for the future when I'll have an UMTS contract".
• Network applications:
  
• web browser: good browser, does the job really well
• e-mail: adequate e-mail program, but doesn't allow me to just peek into my mailbox but keeps the headers of all mails in the mailbox. That's not what I want, particularly given gmails approach of "just keep everything".
  
• uploading images directly to Flickr: worked out of the box (but make sure you read the specific flickr page about that - your normal Flickr user/password won't work). Of course, if you upload images directly from the camera to Flickr (that was amazing...), you lose the chance of applying the massive noise reduction and photoshopping you typically need to do to remove artifacts and stuff.
• Lifeblog: spooky. Do people actually use that? The idea is that my N93 records everything I do - every SMS I get or receive, every image I take, and offers me a button to upload my whole "life as seen from my N93" to a blog. Never tried it.

So all in all networking, connecting to other devices, is something the N93 can do quite well.

Music: The N93 offers two ways to listen to music (probably plus connecting to some streaming web services):

• upload MP3 files (supposedly also AAC, not tried this yet) to your N93 and use the built-in RealPlayer to listen to them. Quality is very good via the headset, acceptable with the speakers.
• use the built-in radio to listen to FM radio. Also good quality, and you can use the speakers to listen, which is something other Nokia phones can't do (of course you still have to plug in the headset which is used as the FM antenna).

The N93 meets my music needs, although the limitation of 2 GB for mini SD cards that you can plug in is a bit disappointing. And it's no match for my iPod.

Business Functionality: this is a section where the N93 shines. It offers

• an excellent integration with Microsoft Outlook (and probably others), where e.g. the whole meeting request incl. room and complete descriptions are synced as well as many details of the Outlook contacts.
• MS Office document viewers that let you see your most important Word/Excel/PPT documents on your phone.
• small helper applications like a timezone-aware clock that also allows you to add multiple other time zones and a currency converter (that you have to set up yourself :-().
• ... and of course all the connectivity that you might need (see above).

Very impressive, and working beautifully.

Games: what about games? Well, I have only tried the built-in games, which are okay but nothing too special. From a pure hardware point of view, the N93 is able to pull off excellent games. With a 333 MHz processor, stereo sound and a 320x200 display it should be able to deliver decent games. But: I doubt that there ever will be a market for N93 games (too few units sold), and that the phone keys are adequate for gaming. So we'll probably have to live with Java games and/or Symbian S60 games. As long as someday there will be a good neural-net based Backgammon for the N93, I can live with that.

Conclusion: what do we have here? A "can do it all" mobile phone, a Swiss Army Knife that does everything, but nothing as good as specific tools (digital camera, iPod, Organizer). Still, the unique thing here is that with a single - albeit a bit bulky - device you get everything. Sure, for my next vacation I'll take my camera, because I know I will want to take photos. And similarly I'll take my iPod with me when I know I'll probably want to listen to a lot of music, just as I'll take my notebook with me for office applications. But in all those situations where you want to shoot a picture without having a camera with me, where I'm longing for some good music, where I need to know my next appointments, I can get quite far with my N93 and a good 2 GB mini SD card (which costs me another 60 Euros - the 128 MB card that is included isn't sufficient at all). The incredible feature count comes at four costs, though: 1) the phone is huge; 2) the phone is expensive; 3) the phone is buggy as hell (crashed on me about 5 times in 3 days of usage, in simple situations like switching to camera mode when the display was locked), and 4) frustration when you know that feature is there, but you can't find it.

If 1) and 2) are no problem for you, and assuming 3) will go away with later versions of the N93 firmware and 4) by just getting used to it, then this is a good mobile phone for you. I'm quite happy with it.