Announced back in 2005, at the time the Nokia N91 appeared to be the geek phone of choice. And that wasn’t down to the fact that it was one of the first Symbian OS 9 and S60 v3 phones. Nor was it the stylish metal casing. Nope, it was the simple fact that this phone has a massive amount of storage. A 4 Gigabyte ‘internal hard drive’ to be precise - most likely along the lines of the Compact Flash based micro drives that were powering the iPod Mini’s of the time. It became an instant object of lust. The Wi-Fi connectivity may have helped as well... Fast forward to today and, with the N91 ready to hit the retail channels, most people are now attracted to the N80, which has a similar feature set but just looks a lot cooler. Which is a shame because the N91 is a cracking little phone and could easily be “the phone to recommend” to the consumer if it weren't for a few worrying little niggles.
Okay, first up to bat is the new version of S60. Now there’s nothing fundamentally new to the end-user, we’re still in standard 176x208 screen resolution here, so if you’ve been using previous S60 phones there's no learning curve to get over (apart from the two applications that make the N91 currently stand out, the music player and the web browser). With the update of the underlying Symbian OS (to 9.1) the plethora of third party C++ applications out there will not be able to run at all on the N91 – this is vitally important if you rely on an application you’ve installed. My biggest problem when reviewing the N91 is that I lost my ability to read eBooks – and it will stay lost until a programmer either tweaks a S60v2 version or someone else writes one from scratch to fill a gap in the marketplace. It'll happen, though the question is when?
Built into the N91, there’s also not the huge range of extra applications found in the upcoming Enterprise devices that have been leading the recent S60 charge. The standard PDA applications are here (Contacts, Calendar, Notes and To-Do– but watch out, as the To-Do application is no longer a separate icon, but part of the Calendar suite. Add in a couple of ancillary applications (Flash Lite player, tutorial application, units converter and calculator), the email client and the aforementioned music player and web browser and you have a rather lean looking smartphone ready for action.
The N91 is designed for one task, and that’s to be a damm fine music phone. This means stuff like Office compatible word processors and Over The Air synchronisation are being left, quite rightly, to the business-focussed devices. Strangely, Push To Talk and Nokia’s Instant Messaging client are still onboard, which indicates that these must now be considered as part of the base package of S60.
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