I’m part of Nokia’s bloggers program, so they occasionally send me new cell phones to try out. I did a review of the Nokia N90 and N70 here, and I still use the N90 all the time. (Just posted a video interview I conducted with the phone here.)
Lately I’ve been giving the N91 (pictured above) a test run. As always, there are tradeoffs between the different models.
Where the N90 is somewhat bulky and heavy, the N91 is light and can easily fit in your shirt pocket. Where the N90 has so many options you can easily get confused, the N91 is fairly intuitive and straight-ahead. Where the N90’s battery died after a day and a half, the N91 seems to last longer. Where the N90 holds only a few short video clips and a few dozen photos, the N91 holds loads more — a thousand or more photos or 3,000 songs in its hard drive (4 GB on mine, but now bulking up to 8 GB). And where the N90 is about video and photos, the N91 is about music.
Here are some other observations about the N91’s capabilities:
• The N91 is podcast-ready. Very nice.
• The music capabilities are cool. But there have been at least a dozen occasions where my N91 started playing music while tucked in my pocket. A jostle here or there can set off the player, and until you get used to the on-screen options, it’s hard to figure out how to turn the dang thing off. (Beware, if you’re heading into a business meeting or theatrical production.)
• I do like the stainless steel slider that reveals the keypad for dialing. Very swift.
• Because I use my cell phone more for shooting images than for making calls, I’m not fond of the N91’s lack of a viewfinder — you can’t frame or compose a photo but can only guesstimate what will be in the image. But the 2 megapixel camera (same as the N90) is pretty good.
• Maybe I’m not as tech-savvy as I’d like to imagine, but I haven’t been able to figure out how to use Bluetooth to download images and photos from my N91 to my new Sony Vaio desktop. (There’s apparently no Bluetooth capability for the Mac.)
• The Nokia PC Suite needs some serious work. Installing the Suite for the N91 made downloading from the N90 impossible — even on the newest versions where Nokia claims they fixed the problem.
• As on the N90, the N91’s on-screen UI needs some work as well. Switching from image to video mode is more cumbersome than it needs to be. Navigating the Gallery can be a hassle (I’ve lost a few video clips mysteriously). And getting out of Music Hell can prove vexing.
Overall, the N91 is a solid, dependable addition to the N-series line of multimedia phones. If you like music on the go and want to pack video, images, texting and voice capability into one neat little package (albeit at a steep $550-$700 US price), check out the N91. It’s a neat little phone, Nokia’s programmers are upgrading the software (downloadable online) all the time, and here are some tips on how to get the best experience out of using your N91.
JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.
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