Nokia N93 review: Ringing camcorder

You've seen it on TV

Further on, the smartphone has a TV-out feature which allows it to connect to any standard TV set with the TV-out cable included in the retail box. Once you connect it to the TV set, you can view your pictures and videos on the large screen. The TV-out functionality supports both PAL and NTSC and screen ratio 4:3 and 16:9.

TV-out options

The TV-out functionality has a very nice implementation. The handset starts transferring the current screen image directly to the TV screen as soon as you connect it via the cable. The cable itself transfers video and stereo audio signal.

The Nokia TV-out cable

The TV image is exactly what appears on the phone's display both in portrait and landscape modes. When you view pictures or video through the Gallery application the TV set receives the multimedia files in a larger resolution than the one on the mobile screen. Thus you can view the VGA (640x480 pixels) resolution videos in their full glory. Unfortunately, that doesn't hold true for the office applications and the Web browser.

Viewing content on the TV screen

Connectivity - full

The phone supports GPRS, EDGE, Wi-Fi, UMTS, PTT, Bluetooth and Infrared. Nokia N93 works with Bluetooth Specification 2.0. Unfortunately, the A2DP profile is not among the supported profiles which makes impossible the use of stereo Bluetooth headset with the phone. But then again, there is only one Nokia handset currently available on the market that supports that profile - the Nokia 8800.

USB 2.0 is also supported with the USB cable supplied in the retail box. When connected to a PC, one of three modes can be chosen for the handset: "Mass storage" - memory card is available as a removable USB drive, no drivers are required; "PC Suite" - standard mode; "Picture Bridge" - direct access to printer, which supports PictBridge.

The fast data transfer can be used via GPRS, EDGE or 3G UMTS. You can also try the Wi-Fi connectivity, in which case you have to be near a Wi-Fi hotspot.

You can set the phone to detect and connect automatically to such hotspots or you can search them manually. When you are connected, N93 automatically creates an access point for the hotspot and starts using its Internet broadband. The connection speed depends on the distance from the hotspot and on the provider. The signal is displayed as the network signal strength.

WLAN Options

Further on, the phone is UPnP (Universal Plug & Play) enabled. The UPnP technology is the wireless alternative to the well known Plug & Play standard that allows seamless connection between different devices. In the future the UPnP enabled devices which have some sort of wireless connectivity options such as Wi-Fi or Bluetooth could easily communicate with other intelligent devices without the need of drivers or user configuration. Thus in several years you could be commanding you entire set of home appliances with the help of your smartphone or PDA only - and what's more - you could do that from your office.

Browsing the web

Web browsing with Nokia N93 is a sheer delight as is the case with all current Nokia smartphones. There are two separate web browser applications. One of them is much simpler and reminds us of the browser implemented in older models. The second one is entirely a different story. It makes even very sophisticated pages fit on the screen and displays web pages just like on PC. There is no doubt that the great display helps a lot for this.

There is even a mouse cursor which can be operated through the four-way navigation button. Surprisingly, it works great and is very easy to control. A semi-transparent mini-map of the page shows up on the screen when scrolling a webpage. The mini-map can also be accessed by a shortcut - the "8" key. You can zoom in and out on the page using the "•" and "#" buttons. It's amazing to see how small the text can be and still remain readable.

Most of the sites we visited (including gsmarena.com, take a look at the screenshots) looked exactly like on the PC. Even when loading complex pages, the web browser was operating fast and there was no slowdown in the scrolling speed. The browser also loads Flash clips (not all of them, pitifully) and has no problems dealing with Java Scripts. All-in-all, it's an impressive job from Nokia. Generally, it's the best mobile browser we've seen.

A great web browser