Nokia N90
The first thing that strikes you about the N90 once it's in your hand is the sheer size of the unit. Sure it packs a lot into the frame, but compared to the svelte forms of some of the 'budget' phones you can get on contract for free nowadays, the N90 better have something to back up its bulk. Luckily, it does. The big selling point of the N90 is that it's a camera phone. Now I know that this term has been thrown about a lot in the last few years, but the N90 is probably the first device to really live up to the promise.

The optics are the most prominent feature of this focus on being a camera (and yes, the pun was intended). With Carl Zeiss optics in the phone and being mentioned in every advert and press release, Nokia are rightly making a big thing of this. What's great, from an end user point of view, is that all the powered auto-focus equipment operates without any user interaction - that's why it's called Auto-focus - and the resulting pictures are some of the best from a 'phone'.
But what gets people most about the N90 isn't the fancy lens, but the fact that it is a transformer. While you might be giggling at visions of little toy cars turning into robots, you're pretty close with the N90. Spinning the camera barrel while closed gives you something very close to a regular camera. Flip up the screen and you can switch to 'handheld' mode, which is primarily for video but also works as a good full screen camera mode as well. Finally whip everything back into place and you have a fully featured flip phone.

Being a camera phone, you'd expect the N90 to deliver some good pictures. Running from 640x480 up to 1600x1200 the pictures are leaps ahead of what we had from the first generation camera phones. The N90's Carl Zeiss lenses are an improvement over the plastic lenses you're used to. Of course that lens technology is improving as well, and the N70 can give the N90 a good run in terms of picture quality (with average subjects and landscapes), but there's a clear winner when comparing shots from these two phones. Compared to a regular digital camera, the N90 still feels a little bit lacking, but the performance is definitely in the "more than good enough" category.

What's more interesting for me is the totally closed 'transformer' mode for taking pictures, because at that point there's no indication that you have a phone. The outside display turns into a viewfinder, with a button on the top of the long spine to take pictures and a secondary cursor for you to move around the menu system. I've handed this to people to take pictures and they've had no problem working out what to do. It's only when it rings and I open the clamshell that they do a double take.
The other main addition to the N90 over a regular camera phone is the auto-focus in the lens system. This makes very small adjustments to the lens distance, and thus to the focusing of your pictures.

The video camera functionality is definitely one of the strengths of the N90. The 352 by 288, 15 frames per second output is quite acceptable for ad-hoc home movies, with pixellation only apparent when blown up on a large screen and with the frame rate only being a problem when panning around quickly. Everyone knows what you can do with your camera, but if you take the N90 and then look at something like the Video iPod, you'll see that the N90 is a perfect (and cheap) tool to create a video suitable for delivery over iTunes to the iPod. And this alone makes the N90 a tempting phone to carry for bloggers, and it wouldn't surprise me to see a major news event captured on this smartphone featured on the news in 2006.

The N90, right now, is probably the most feature-packed Series 60 smartphone, and it will remain that way until the recently announced devices for the first half of 2006 make an appearance in the retail channels. It really does show how far the cameraphone/smartphone genre has come in the last few years. It's also a call to developers to make sure that they're following recommended practice when designing applications, i.e. that they're not hard coding interfaces to use a specific screen size. The N90 is the first phone to break out of the standard form factor in terms of screen resolution and fonts available. To sum up, the N90 is Nokia's first true cameraphone to focus on the camera, and it's all the better for it. Yes, the unit has a number of quirks in the design, but the software, the operation and general polish of Series 60 continues, and makes the N90 the high-end phone of the moment in both Nokia's N range and in terms of smartphones in general. It might be marketed with the camera as its killer feature, but with Series 60 it covers all the bases, and covers them well. Right now, there's no solid reason to not look very, very seriously at the N90.