Nokia N93 review: Ringing camcorder

Note it, plan it, task it

The phone has various organizer applications and features. It features a dual clock. You can set two different times and dates in two time zones. The Calendar has Monthly, Weekly and Daily view. You can assign Meeting, Anniversary, Memo and To-do tasks in the Calendar. You can also put alarms on those assignments.

Calendar: monthly, weekly, and daily view

There is also an Office icon in the main menu and it leads to a folder with Notes, Converter, Calculator, Recorder and Quickoffice. The Converter converts Currencies, Area, Energy, Length, Mass, Power, Pressure, Temperature, Time, Velocity and Volume. The calculator is very simple and easy to use. Regrettably, the Recorder has a one minute limit for voice records. This seems quite illogical since the phone has such powerful features, enough internal memory and a memory card slot.

Converter • Calculator • Recorder • Sample note

The Quickoffice opens various office files such as ones created by MS Word, MS Excel, MS Powerpoint and Adobe Acrobat. They can be viewed seamlessly. Zooming, Scrolling, Resizing are supported as well. Regrettably, you cannot modify them in any way. There is also a Data Transfer application in the Tools submenu. It is used to transfer contacts and organizer items from one Nokia phone to another.

Word file • Excel file • PDF file

Further on, the phone has an excellent Tutorial tool which describes in a very user-friendly way the main functions of the phone.

Available tutorials • "DVD Creation" help file

There are several applications preinstalled in the phone: Catalogs, Barcode reader, "Lifeblog", etc. "Catalogs" is a free application for downloading catalogs of paid content for your mobile such as tools, videos, ringtones, and games. The Barcode reader application is used to decode different types of codes (for example, barcodes and codes in magazines). The codes may contain information such as URL links, e-mail addresses, and phone numbers. The Nokia Lifeblog application is used for publishing to your blog directly from your phone. It works with most of the major blog service sites in the world. There are also some printing applications such as the Image print application for printing images from the camera.

Nokia N93 also has Online sharing support. Using it you can share your images and videos in online albums, weblogs, or in other sharing services on the Web. You can upload content, save unfinished posts as drafts and continue later, and view the content of the albums. In order to connect your mobile directly to a service provider such as Flickr you must download a configuration file.

Barcode reader, Nokia Lifeblog

One of the main issues of Nokia N93 is that the relatively new Symbian 9.1 OS is not compatible with applications written for older versions. Thus you would have difficulties finding additional software for this phone. We could only hope that by the end of the summer new 3rd party applications would begin to gradually emerge on the market.

Yet again, a snake pit

N93 has two preinstalled games: Snakes and Card Deck. "Snakes" is a 3D version of the popular Snake game of the Nokia phones. It is quite enjoyable and we found it very amusing. Card Deck is a simple Java game that features a package of several card games like Klondike, Golf, etc... Of course, you can install additional games.

Snake game in portrait mode

Card Deck games

Final words…

Cumbersome and expensive are two words that best describe the Nokia N93. There is no doubt that it is a smartphone with exceptional capabilities. But it would remain a product for the tech buffs only. The advances in digital camera technology are a great thing but in the end it seems that those cannot find their place in a device that you would use conveniently in your every-day life.