08 August 2006
Displays
I’ll start with the smaller outer display, extremely small and disappointing display, resolution is just 128x36 px, physical size is 1.1" and it is capable to show up to 65,536 pretty useless colours.
In practice the display is almost completely useless, it seems as if it is the same display as on the N92. It is a huge step back and it is far away from the great and fully functional displays implemented on N90 (128*128) or N71 (96x68).
Display shows just a basic information, signal and battery indicator with dominated clock in the middle, also it is capable to show standard set of warning indicator (BT, IrDA, message indicators, alarm and so on).
Also it shows the information about missed calls but it is impossible to check the caller without opening the phone. Exactly the same situation with the message: it shows that you have new message but it is even impossible to check the sender. However,, at least it shows the callers image and has another cool feature which isn’t related to the display but I want to mention it: if you want, from the profiles menu you can choose that the caller’s name to be said when your device rings. Of course the callers name must be saved in contacts.
It is weird that the display has a surprising good customization menu for such a small screen. It allows you to setup, background, closing animation as well as the closing/opening sound. Also from the same menu we can choose among active or passive fold separately for opening and closing.
Actually the only real usage of this display is for controlling the music player or radio in the closed mode, it shows the current song and small equalizer and it is possible to switch the song or change volume.
To conclude, I’m really disappointed about the outer screen, it provides just basic information and for everything else you have to open the phone. There are some tricky situations and places where the phone is not admitted and working with such a huge phone could be pretty embarrassing.
I just hope it will be fixed in upcoming versions, at least we need an option to check missed calls and read the messages.
Main screen
N93 has active matrix 2.4" QVGA (320 x 240) color display, with incredible good viewing angle of wide 160° and it is capable to show up to 262,144 colors. Display is undeniably great and large, really large and it causes very well known “wow-effect” at first sight and it will remain for a quite long time if you did not have any experience with high resolution screens but.. .. If you are familiar with high resolution displays, after some time you will be definitely disappointed with pixel density and single pixel size which is simply insufficient for such a great phone.
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*click to enlarge |
Let me try to explain above images, it shows relation between resolution and psychical size of the screen, higher score is better of course. Nokia N90/80s screen, with more than 10.000 pixels per square cm looks simply wonderful, showed image is almost ideal, even very bad photos look wonderful compressed on such a screen, it is impossible to see single pixel without clump because the physical size of the pixel is too small, slant line is a line not a stairway if you know what I mean.
Besides the better and sharper image HR, screens are capable to show more information which is crucial in using the net browser or working with office documents, excel for example and it is the pretty important the fact when we talked about small mobile phones screens isn’t it!?
I guess it is more than obvious that I prefer high-resolution (high pixel density) screens and therefore I'm disappointed with the N93 resolution and pixels density, in the fact I cannot find right word or sentence to express how much I’m disappointed with QVGA screen especially considering that I ‘m the proud owner of the N90 with amazing pixels density (2.2” / 352 x 416 px) and it is the really hard to fall into low resolution again :(
This phone deserves better resolution, such a great VGA recorder requires a great VGA display, and that’s what I have expected from this phones, especially considering that Texas’s chipset support VGA resolution and there is already Sharp’s phone that features VGA resolution even on the physically smaller screen. Anyway, ~3” screen is the perfect physical size for VGA resolution and I truly hope that we can expect such a phone very soon.
From another point of view there is no doubt that average phone user would be completely satisfied with this screen; especially owners of the some older phones with lower resolution screens.
Besides the size, another good aspect of this screen is the fact that it has special matt film layer which does not reflect as much light as on older phones and therefore display is readable and useable even on the direct summer sun light in wide viewing angle. It has a little bit better pixel density than the older models and displayed picture is sharp and vivid with realistic colours. Same as on all newer hones backlight is automatically adjusted based on the exterior lighting conditions.
Keypad
Due to to the overall phone size the keypad is really large with huge keys, definitely suitable for the large male fingers but it is expectable from such a huge phone. Keys are separated into two, actually three main parts, the bottom part contains alphanumeric key, the middle line contains all symbian related buttons and at the top the joypad surrounded by the navigation keys.
Working with such a keyboard is pleasure, really good feeling, keys are soft but at the same time it produce a little bit to noise click sound for my taste. The only bad aspect is the the fact that some keys are almost unreachable in the laptop form the factor.
Loudspeaker
This is the pretty objective part but I can say that quality of the loudspeaker is comparable to the N90 and speaker is maybe even louder mainly due to to the very good position below the external screen. The speaker provides mono sound but it is still good enough for the radio, watching video clips and even for the listening music but for music you shouldn’t go above the 80% and for real listening experience you should attach headphones.
Connectivity options
Nokia N93 offers all that you could expect or need in working with this phone. So far I have tested all of them except the UPnP and I did not find any noticeable problems. The phone supports GPRS, EDGE, UMTS, WiFi, UPnP, Bluetooth (v2.0), IrDa and USB 2.0 via Pop-Port™ interface and mass storage class support to support drag and drop functionality.
Unfortunately it lacks the A2DP profile and it makes the usage of stereo Bluetooth headsets impossible, but the good news is that as far as I know there is a 3rd party plug in which makes this possible. I have to mention that working with pop-port has significantly improved, connection is still weak and you have to be very careful with working with pop-port connector.
Now on connection phone will prompt you what you want to do (default action could be set in the settings) and it will offer you four different options: using the phone as a media player, as a mass storage (data transfer), standard and very well known PC Suite mode and at the end it offers the Image print mode which allow direct connection with the printers that supports this standard.
.:[ Nokia N93 - Technical Specifications ]:.
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