Measuring 56 by 118 by 28mm the N93i is not a small phone and will need a big pocket or bag to keep it safe, but then when you consider that the 180 gram camcorder phone combo replaces much bigger items you can forgive it being more than a bit chunky. Safe to say you will always know when the N93i is with you. What is essentially a tri band mobile also has a good GPRS data connection and wireless access via 802.11b and Bluetooth 2.0 which was a surprise to us as we expected little more than a normal phone with video recording bolted on.

Based around a series 60 V 3.0 interface the menus and familiar to any Nokia user and as easy to use as ever, there are all the usual PIM features, contacts, SMS and MMS messaging, email and web browsing which seems quite good on the large 240 x 320 pixel display.

Imaging had to be the strong point of the N93i and indeed it is, the 3.2 mega pixel Carl Zeiss lens may not sound that great now given that models like the N95 have broken the 5 mega pixel barrier, but the trick here is the zoom. Nokia have endowed this lens with a real 3.0 x optical zoom and if you insist on going further there is a 20 x digital zoom but the less said about that the better. We took a number of digital photos in the course of our week with the Nokia and they surprised us as to the quality, images were sharp and colourful and better than some 5.0 pixel cameras we have tried, the trick here is the lens, it is a good quality one and used with the 3 x zoom it is much better than digital zoom on a 5 mega pixel one.

Switching into camcorder mode reminded us of the children's cartoon "the transformers" where cars and trucks transformed into robots with many twist and bits folding out. Take hold of the N93 and twist, the hinge hides the main lens and the screen swivels round and hinges out to provide a large colour viewfinder. Now you'd better not be hoping to use this phone for you've been framed as it takes quite some time to do all this electronic origami and also a while for the software to wake up ready to film.

So now we are finally ready to shoot and with a push of the thumb we are off and roaming the office recording the team had at work (still life is so much easier to capture) Nokia claim to get around 45 minutes of "DVD quality video" onto a 1gb SD card. You will need the SD memory as the internal memory is only a paltry 50Mb, soon we had some 15 minutes recorded and so it was time to slide the SD card into a suitably equipped laptop and see what we had.

Again not what we were expecting or at least not what we expected "DVD quality" to look like, because unless our eyes deceive us this is a 640 x 480 VGA video capture which is more webcam than DVD, sure its a full 30 frames per second but the resolution is so low it hardly seems worth putting such a good lens on the phone. We'd go as far as to say that the video feature are far more of a gimmick than a serious tool and are nowhere near a digital camcorder that you can buy for around £300.

If you make full use of the WiFi and camcorder it is possible to drain the battery in around 3.5 hours, the 950 mAh unit will keep the phone alive for a claimed 11 days but we found that in normal use with some Bluetooth and moderate calls 4 days was more realistic. The media player also takes its toll with it killing the battery in just 6 hours. It is worth mentioning the media player which when combined with a 1gb card is really rather good, there is also an FM radio which is only ruined by Nokias refusal to put a 3.5mm audio jack on the N93i.

A nice touch is the TV out which allows you to plug up the unit straight to a V or monitor and watch your recorded video or even create and manage slideshows (with music).

The Nokia N93i really is a very strange phone, on one hand its main feature (video) is fairly poor and a real let down but the camera is rather good, battery life isn't too hot but then it has full WiFi and makes a great web browser with that large video viewer screen. So 7 days after collecting our N93i the result seems to hang on a knife edge, well not quite, the N93i is a brick of a phone and it would take more than WiFi and a camera to convince us to lug round 180 grams of webcam every day.

A nice try but this must just be a first pass from Nokia?

Published - 15/04/2007

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