NEVER EVER take an E90 along with you to a family outing to the cinema. You’ll end up with a clip round the ear from your wife!! “Put that bloody thing down before I throw it in the bin.” (Combined with one of those looks.) Wow. I hadn’t realised I was pushing the limits. The E90 is a dangerous tool!
Apart from threatening to wreck the family, its also threatening to kill my two-device strategy of small feature-phone and ultra mobile PC and the main reason, I think, is the combination of advanced features in such a tiny package. The E90 gives me the feelings I had when I used to use a Psion 5. A feeling of excitement, adventure, freedom and confidence and if you add productivity on top, its easy to justify a purchase. (If not, just blame James Kendrick!)
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Excitement. The E90 is the most amazing bit of minaturised technology I’ve ever had in my hand. WiFi, Bluetooth, HSDPA, GSM, GPS and FM radios, CPU, two screens, two cameras, keyboard, numeric keypad, speakers, USB, headphone socket, micro SD slot and a 5.5W battery. Incredible engineering. You could fit two E90’s inside an Everun and 9 of them inside a Q1 UMPC. Its amazingly tiny!
Adventure. Its size and operating system capability gives someone like me (a tinkerer) a wealth of new ideas. Moblogging, live video streaming, mapping. I love that side of it.
Freedom. Its so small that it actually allows me to go out and stay connected, without a bag. Its light, its small.
Confidence. The build quality is excellent. I wouldn’t like to drop it but I have confidence in using it day to day for a long time. I also have confidence that it will get better over time too. There aren’t many app’s that take advantage of the E90’s super screen and I cant wait to see games, image editors, html composing tools, music tools and lots lots more. The S60 community seems very active.
But what about mobile productivity? That’s what the E90 is all about isn’t it? Well I guess so but it depends what you mean by productivity. If you mean editing a word document on a train, or finalising a presentation or marking up a PDF document them I’m afraid not. This is grown-up ultra mobile PC territory. But if you mean emails (reading and composing), reading basic website content, being 100% Internet connected, being able to capture images and videos and carrying documents then yes yes yes! If you want that sort of productivity 24 hours a day in both business and personal situations then the E90 is a really fantastic tool. Its small enough to be used as a phone and carried in a pocket in almost every case you can think of.
So will I be keeping it? No! The problem for me mainly lies in the expression ‘basic Internet content.’ My online practices are based around a number of Internet applications and rich web pages and media content. I have already become accustomed to the power and flexibility of an x86 operating system and I really can’t 
go back to a simple Internet world. Sure, the Everun doesn’t have the efficient user interface or the shortcut buttons – on the E90 you can flip open the instant-on screen and hit the Internet button. You’re in, connected and its a lovely feeling but its slow and limited once you get past that point. The same is true of pretty much every sub-ultra mobile PC and having seen this first hand now, I’m happy that I made right decision in moving the Sub-UMPCs out of the main ultra mobile PC database. Imagine an Internet world without flash and java app’s and media plugins where selection boxes don’t always work and scrolling around with cursor keys is the best way to click on links. The E90 Internet experience is good but far, far-removed from the FIE. Its not even as good as the N800, if it was, I might be tempted to keep it but for the time being, I’ll be going back to the two-device strategy of feature-phone and ultra mobile PC [Afterthought: There’s no way the E90 could be a 24×7 phone for me. Its too big and worth too much money so I would end up having to have two devices anyway!]
With the Everun as my second device I will have to suffer a little knowing that much of what I do can be done in a smaller device. The Everun isn’t pocketable. It has less battery life and I’m going to HAVE to get HSDPA fitted in order to match the great online capability of the E90. The user interface on the E90 was easy and even the keyboard is better than the Everun but its all useless if I can’t get my daily online processes working. With the Everun I can and it’s still an adventurous, exciting, confident experience. its just that I’m going to have to forego a bit of freedom and get the mini gadget-bag out again.
Assuming you always need a small phone, which device would you add?
Everun or E90?
The E90 is an amazing device and for anyone that’s not deeply reliant on the Full Internet Experience or on having Microsoft Windows applications at your fingertips, its perfect. It really is about as convergent as you can get today with a phone and a and Internet capabilities but its not a UMPC. Its a Sub-UMPC.
Lets go through some facts about the E90. Some good and bad points. For a full review I recommend Steve Litchfields review at All About Symbian but here’s my summary.
- Keyboard. Great. So small. So useable. Comfortable. About 40-50% of normal typing speed.
- Photo quality. Wow! I was able to take respectable digital snapshots and send them to flickr. Great feature.
- Video. Far better than my existing phone. Arguably good enough to replace my dedicated camera for web-based video.
- Screens. Great to have the two usage modes. Browsing on the 800-wide internal screen is great although it would be nice if it was a hundred pixels bigger in the vertical plane. Could be brighter but it is transflective which makes it useable in direct sunlight.
- Key backlight is good. Always a good feature to have.
- GPS. Its sloooooooooooooow. If a GPS takes 5 minutes to lock every time you go to use it, it reduces its usefulness by a lot. Its worse than my Garmin E-trex which, I think, is 5 years old technology. Disappointing but useful in the car. Navigation software seems good. Subscription prices are reasonable.
- No Skype. Grrrr. It supports SIP-based voip though….
- SIP phone. Works! I used Sipgate and it was easy to set up and the quality is very good. This is a great feature and has the potential to really save money.
- Browser. I mentioned it before. Way way short of an ultra mobile PC FIE (full Internet experience.) If you’re used to advanced Web applications, it WILL disappoint.
- Multimedia. Pretty good. Serves its purpose. Can easily replace an iPod for playback duties but you’ll have to make sacrifices for library and transfer features. Screen ratio (super super wide!) not very nice for playback of 4:3 video material.
- Battery life. In comparison with a UMPC. Excellent. Superb. All-day use.
- Phone, calendar, contacts all good enough. Speakerphone good.
- Third party applications. Gmail, Google Maps (excellent on the big screen!), Agile Messenger (crashes when you try to use the big screen) , Shozu, Internet Radio app all work well. I can’t wait for Google to release a java-based reader application like their Gmail app. It would be nice to have a dedicated blogging application. Emailing to flickr (with auto-post blog post feature enabled ) is a good idea but its not reliable enough.
- Size, weight. OK for day use. Not so good in social situations or if you don’t like putting heavy items in pockets. Got a handbag? The E90 is no problem for you.
- HSDPA speeds. Wooooosh! 1.5mbps measured on a big download. (using 3.6Mbps HSDPA)
- Build quality – Top notch. Feels lovely and solid. Camera shutter release is difficult to work.
- Nice to have a real USB port and real headset port (2.5mm) on a phone. Headset quality is poor for music playback. Needs more control functions on the headset itself.
Feel free to ask questions offer your E90/S60 tips. I won’t be keeping the E90 but its possible that my wife will take it on so I need to optimise it for her. In the meantime, I’m planning to make a video with the E90 and the Everun devices and I will be using the Smartphone vs ultra mobile PC comparison list I wrote up last week. It should help to demonstrate some of the differences between the two devices and highlight areas where improvements are needed in order to get the ultimate Carrypad.
Specs and links for the E90 are in the product database.
