Nokia N93 review: Ringing camcorder

The Nokia N93 has been on the market for some time now and it did arouse a lot of commotion when it was first officially announced. The extraordinary Carl-Zeiss optical zoom combined with a Vario-Tessar lens was enough to rocket the anticipation of Nokia fans to the skies. This combined with video capturing in VGA resolution at a high framerate is an outstanding achievement that not before long was something reserved for the digital camcorders realm. Now the time has come to see for ourselves how good in reality the ground-breaking Nokia N93 is.

Official photos

Key features:

• 3 megapixel camera with autofocus and 3x optical zoom
• Video recording in VGA resolution@30fps
• Twist and Shoot clamshell form factor
• Symbian OS 9.1 S60 3rd Edition UI
• miniSD card slot
• Stereo FM radio
• 50 MB internal memory
• Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB, Infrared, UPnP and TV-out connectivity options
• Rather comfortable keyboard

Main disadvantages:

• Large and heavy
• Picture and video quality not so great
• Optical zoom buzzing gets recorded in videos

The phone is supposed to be delivered in a package along with a Nokia stereo headset HS-23, a Nokia USB cable CA-53, a Nokia TV-out cable CA-64U, a wrist strap, a pouch, and a 128 MB miniSD memory card. All this is market dependent of course, so take that information with a grain of salt.

Dubbed as multimedia computer, the Nokia N93 was highly awaited by our team since the specs sounded more than promising. The eagerness to try it first hand built up as time went on and the first sample pictures and videos captured with the phone started to pop up here and there. The mobile is supposed to be one of the top multimedia phones on the market and it was even voted European media phone of the Year 2006-2007. You can understand our impatience to test it and since you are reading this review, you probably share it, too.

Nokia N93 held in hand

However, it turned out that the striving for making it the utmost multimedia machine has turned the Nokia N93 into the utmost uncomfortable mobile phone to use in your everyday life. The sheer size of the thing makes it a portable device that most probably would end up lying on the shelf besides your digital camera just begging to be taken out on those weekends out of town. What we are trying to say is that the multimedia part of the device has evolved so much that now it's no more comfortable to carry it with you and take the occasional snapshot from time to time - while this was the original idea when incorporating digital cameras into mobile phones. Nokia has just crossed the line and went too far this time - venturing into an entirely different product category. But when you take a not-so-good digital camcorder, combine it with a not-so-smart smartphone, add up a size that would easily make you start thinking of carrying a bag, and finally put a price tag exceeding that of the latest PocketPCs and smartphones on the market, then… you are in for a highly dissatisfying product.

Nokia N93 is available in two colors - silver and black. Our phone we got to test was the black one.

Nokia N93 silver and black version

Nokia N93 compared to the compact Nokia E50 smartphone