Hands-on with the Nokia E90 business smartphone

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We open up Nokia's super-wide QWERTY clamshell, with its huge keypad and loads of features. Is it worth cramming into your pocket?

When we first laid eyes on the Nokia E90 at a recent press event in New York City, we thought: "Wow, how did they get a phone inside that football?" When you hold the Nokia E90, you may feel like asking a receiver to go long, because it is a hefty phone in every dimension. After playing with it for a few moments, we started to wonder whether it might be more like a classic Cadillac than a football.

If you're going to make a smartphone with a keyboard as large as the comfortable QWERTY keys on the E90, you might as well throw in every other feature you can think of. Just as they did with the N95, Nokia has spared no expense with the E90. It packs HSDPA for 3G cellular networking. Not only do you get Wi-Fi, but you get 802.11g, for faster WLAN support. GPS comes included with Nokia Maps. Even the Bluetooth and USB connections are both 2.0 varieties for more speed.

There is a 3.2-megapixel camera around back, and a video conferencing lens in the clamshell, though since the phone only supports the European 2100 band for HSDPA, we won't be seeing any video sharing in the U.S. The two screens are impressive. The front screen is a QVGA display, while the internal has an 800 by 352 pixel resolution, a strange but very wide screen indeed. Both can handle 16-million colors, but we'd expect no less from the screen on a high-end Nokia phone.

Symbian S60 and the letter "E" in front of E90 mean this phone is a business phone, which probably explains the huge keys. Maybe we're exagerating, but it would be a mistake to think of this phone as a slightly larger, feature-rich version of the LG enV on Verizon Wireless. While we wouldn't mind seeing a QVGA screen deck the external shell of the latter phone, the E90's large keys and advanced OS means this is a phone for users who will be creating documents, not just reading e-mail. Perhaps for travelers, this could be a phone to keep the laptop stowed on long flights, or during meetings, but it is not small enough to slip into a pocket. It's an interesting stab at a common complaint, the too-small keypad. Perhaps it will suit the business user who always carries a briefcase, or likes to get in a quick game of catch. 

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