(Re)Discovering the joy of the Nokia N93

For a long time a few years back, I used a Nokia N90, and then a Nokia N93. I loved them. Obviously I had issues with the wider concept of the Nokia/Symbian architecture, but, I must be clear, I loved the phone, it was genius.

The best bit about it was being able to flip it open, then flip the screen and within a second or two, be ready to take a picture or a video.

This was, of course, before the days of FlixWagon and Qik. You took a video and, er, … it sat on your phone. And you couldn’t actually upload it live, because every operator was charging 3 or 4 quid a meg for data transfer at that point.

The N93 was slightly slow when it came to the Gallery and other functions. But the ‘near DVD quality’ video and 3.2 megapixel camera was spot on. Here’s the Gary Oldman ad by Nokia (itself, also a piece of genius):

My N93 headed to the shelf — sadly, on reflection — when the N95 came along. Yes that handset was annoyingly flawed (well, the firmware, anyway), but it was a lot smaller, better camera, better video, lighter.

So my N93 has sat gathering dust. Until the other night when I wanted to take some video of the Private Mobile Network working. I reached for the N93 and thoroughly enjoyed the experience. I remembered that it had WiFi capabilities (no sim though) so I connected it to the local network and then I remembered it still had one of my ShoZu accounts running. Perfect. So the photos of the Private Mobile Network yesterday come courtesy of the N93. Here’s one of them:

You can pick up an N93 on eBay UK (24 available right now) for about 140 pounds ‘buy now’ or slightly cheaper if you hang around for the auctions to end.

I was talking with Ricky Cadden of Symbian Guru earlier about just how little development appears to be going on across the industry as a whole (handsets included). Just looking at this N93 (launched, according to Engadget on the 24th April 2006), the model is more than 2 years old.

I can’t see much difference between it and, say, a Nokia N95 8GB or a Nokia N82. One or two improvements — more memory, obviously, slightly faster processor… but really, there’s hardly much difference beyond a few incremental upgrades so far. Whilst the N93 is a bit of a chunky phone, it’s doing a good job even today. Simultaneously great news and highly depressing.

Great news because for the installed base, Nokia’s delivered a handset with a degree of lasting appeal. But depressing in the context of boring, staid, incremental innovation.

Anyway… I’m going to find a sim and try it with some streaming video services.