Ewan drifts back from the E90 to his trusty Nokia 9300i Communicator and finds that life with the latter isn't quite as rosy as he'd remembered. Still, he reckons the 9300i wins for some email and most writing work.
Read on in the full article.
Some observations:
1. The E90 is fully capable on the outside screen, which makes it a very powerful overall package
2. A2DP is under rated. Works well on the E90
3. Finally Push email. Again out off the box sync with MS Exchange (free) is really useful on the E90.
I personally found the 9300 difficult to use in mini-laptop mode, which is much easier with the E90.
Shocker! Ewan "I leave my E90 closed" says E90 is an improvement overall! 😊
But seriously, like Ewan says, it's horses for courses. There's no perfect device anywhere, you have to choose what your priorities are. Every advantage comes with a disadvantage, either in features, price, battery life or size.
Every time a phone review appears on AAS someone posts a question like "is this phone better than X?", and virtually every time the correct answer is "it depends what you want from a phone most".
Even the supposedly upgraded N93i wasn't a completely clear improvement over the original N93, as shown by Steve's comparison of the two.
How did you carry the E90? In a case? In your pocket? I recall having issues with my old 9290 size (I can not afford 2 phones of these prices), but now I am about to change my N95 for an E90, because I think I will use more a bigger screen than a 5 Mp camera.
One ting that bothers me is that I live in a hot City, the average temperature is 25�C, so 70% of the time I do not wear a jacket to carry my phone.
I loved my 9300/9300i phones - great build quality, good bundled software (browser aside) and absolutely the best keyboard ever created for a phone - the thing was so good that I actually got close to desktop typing speeds at times.
In fact, the keyboard redesign was why I held off buying an E90 until I cound test one for a while. My local Voda store let me have one for a few days last week (thanks Najib, if you're reading this!) and while I've not done anything like a comprehensive test, it is clear to me that the keyboard is a step backwards.
No more really needs to be said about how far the bundled software falls behind the capabilities of the hardware and the (generally slight for a new release) reported hardware quality issues seem minor.
Otherwise, though, the phone is great and the spec means it should have a two-year lifespan.
So, I've decided to go for the E90 and hope I get better with the keyboard with more use but the 9300 was the zenith of mobile phone typing - you can see it's influence in the domed keys on some HTC sliders (though the keyboard itself is horrid) but it amazes me that no other major manufacturer tried to replicate the 9300.
With the new Opera beta browser, it's given the 9300 a new lease on life.. It renders 95% of the pages out there with ease. The multitasking is super.. great stability. s80 has proven to be very logical and simple to use.
I had a Nokia e70, but ebayed it shortly after purchasing it, memory issues were the main culprit. Only one, maybe two apps would open at once. And forget using the web with out a browser crash.