Two Months With An E90

It’s been over two months now that I’ve been using an E90 – after the usual few weeks leading up to local launch and a break to try out some other gear, I ended up bringing one with me on vacation, and that served as an excellent field test.

And since today is my final day of freedom before heading back for another long and stressful stint in corporate land, I thought I ought to expand on my current set of notes regarding the device.

To be completely honest, I originally had in mind picking up an E61i to bring along, since it is closer to the BlackBerry form factor – and if there is one thing you don’t usually want to carry on vacation, it’s a bulky phone. The E61i is not tiny by any means, but it’s passable.

But as it happened, it was simpler to get an E90 again. And after three weeks of using it as a laptop replacement for reading e-mail, keeping track of news, posting links and researching topics of interest, it kind of grew on me.

Mind you, it’s nothing like the old Communicators – in fact, the subtle ways in which Nokia managed to render it inferior to old Series 80 devices and infuriate pretty much every single hard-core Communicator user out there are the stuff of legend, and shall not be recounted here.

Suffice it to say that there are times when, for all its HSDPA goodness and reasonably good Exchange support, it is as dumb, slow and unrewarding as the proverbial brick it is often compared to.

If want to know more about the genesis of it, I recommend this piece on how infighting and loss of focus helped Nokia cripple what is probably their most powerful device right now.

Nevertheless, once you get over your frustration with the completely obtuse way in which Nokia stuffed Series 60 applications into the device (by dint of moving buttons around without actually adapting the software), it almost works¹.

On the physical side, writing on its keyboard is a challenge in many ways – not the least of which is the extremely poor touch, which renders the whole experience disagreeable and finicky.

I find it nearly impossible to locate the preposterously tiny dimples on the F and J keys or position my fingers in a way where I know which key I’m going to hit next by touch alone, which slows me down tremendously – and the bad impression is compounded by the rather unimpressive tactile feedback, somewhat akin to month-old marshmallows.

Even after several weeks of use, having to type anything on it was a chore, and I found myself more than once clipping my sentences just to get it over with².

But I cannot fault the hardware alone for the slow, quasi bovine fashion in which the device responds to a key press. Besides the e-mail client (which is also given to bouts of slowness), the built-in Active Notes application was slow, unresponsive and cluttered the screen with useless frills – i.e., wasting an entire line of the screen with a pointless border.

And I would occasionally howl in frustration not just at the device’s sluggish text editing abilities but also at the auto capitalization featurette, which has got to be one of the dumbest, most asinine things ever to grace a full-keyboard device.

It needs an off switch, and by Jove, if Nokia can cram a hundred useless options into their UI, they might as well add something to deal with this.

But, of course, there’s something to be said for having an 800×352 screen, and using the new Opera Mini Beta 2 on it (in both portrait and landscape modes) made for some pretty enjoyable web surfing by the pool.

Here are a few screenshots of it in both modes, and with different font sizes (click to zoom in, right-click and view image for native resolution at 1:1 ratio):