Why I bought this phone: The Samsung Z500 experience taught me how useful a camera is to have on you. This phone has 3x OPTICAL zoom - not digital. This is real zoom rather than simply making each pixel bigger which is what happens with digital zoom. I do not count digital zoom whenever I am comparing lenses, cameras or phones. I.e. This is one of a very small number of phones with a zoom function. Nokia has this phone, its successor, the N93i and Samsung released the G810 with a zoom.

The Samsung experience also taught me that I wanted to back to Nokia.

Again, I chose a flip phone to protect the keypad from accidental dialling and this also protects the main screen yet with the outside screen I can see who’s calling and a brief summary of a text received, similar to Outlook’s desktop alert that comes in the bottom right hand corner of the screen or similar to iPhone’s summary when the phone is locked. Because to the different configurations of this phone, there are a number of duplicated buttons.

On the top right of the above photo, the N93 is in its camera / camcorder mode. The N93 automatically enters into this mode when put in this configuration. This is incredibly useful when you want to take the shot of what it happening right now. While others will be going through the menu trying to find the camera you would already have taken your first shot. 

Nokia really went to town trying to capture the market of photographers wanting a good camera in their phone instead of carrying around a point and click as well as their mobile. The lens in a Carl Zeiss lens which was better than any other camera phone on the market. Carl Zeiss lenses are used in surgical theatres because of their quality to put things into perspective. The sensor, because of the fact it points to the side, could be larger than other camera phones (1/3.2” whereas previously it has been between 1/10” and 1/3.6”). This reduces the noise of a photo (the measure of whether a pixel is showing what it’s supposed to) which is quite a challenge for camera phones as they have to be quite small. The popular belief that the more mega pixels means a better photo is not one shared by photographers who know what they’re talking about. 3 MP without any noise is much better than 5 MP that is full of noise. Nokia also included image stabilisation to reduce motion blur when taking photos or videos. There have been many comparisons with the N93 with either other phones with higher mega pixel rating (N95, N8, K800i etc) and even some dedicated cameras! The N93 came out holding its head high even though it was shown that there were some things that could have easily been tweaked to give an even better result for the N93.

The video function of the N93 is where it really comes into its own. As mentioned elsewhere on this site, I have a Panasonic FZ30 as my main camera. When shooting video, I would choose the N93 over the Panasonic. The N93 has stereo microphones to produce a better sound track to your video and it looks more like a camcorder. As mentioned earlier, there are duplicated buttons. This is very useful at this point as you have the second D pad for your right thumb when in camcorder mode and also the menu buttons for your left hand. Admitted that this does make this phone very much a right handed phone.

When this phone came out, there was a trend for video web logging. (The term web logging became shortened to blogging then video blogging became vlogging.) This phone was almost the perfect phone for this. The only addition needed was an optional extra of a QWERTY (or whichever flavour you prefer) keyboard. Options for this keyboard were either Bluetooth or used the ‘Universal port’. When the keyboard was connected, the configuration shown on the bottom right of the above photo made it like a mini (admitted tiny) laptop / netbook. (Netbooks hadn’t been introduced at this point.) and allowed it to be the best phone for vlogging. It was an odd configuration to use without the optional keyboard as the keypad remained the same so it couldn’t act like a laptop out of the box. The only advantage to this configuration is if you were displaying videos you have taken. Why you wouldn’t use the included AV cable to connect it to any available TV is beyond me. There was a reason why this cable was included in the box!

As a phone this handset is surprisingly large despite what I’ve mentioned before about the trend of 3G phones. It did not have (nor need) a touch-screen so web browsing was at times difficult. It did not have a flash player so any flash based web pages were not viewable on this phone. One of the video microphones acted as the phone microphone which put it into an odd place - instead of this microphone being at the bottom of the keypad as you would expect for a phone, the microphone is actually in the middle when open. Admitted, it would have been funny to see people shouting into the bottom of the keypad when the other end couldn’t hear them if it wasn’t for the fact I’ve never seen anyone else use a N93. I have, however, seen a N93i be a movie star: One of the characters in Transformers used a N93i to demonstrated the power of the AllSpark - the phone turned into a deranged transformer and had to be destroyed. (sorry, I could only find a Russian version)

Getting a case for this handset was, as you can probably imagine, quite difficult. Luckily, a case does exist which comes in two separate pieces (the Samsung Z500 had one with elastic in the middle to allow the flip action and for attaching the case) which had to be separated whenever you wanted to twist the screen for the ‘laptop’ or camcorder configuration.

Negatives: Size. I can see why it is the size it is but still. 

Ideally, it would have had an alphabetic keyboard when in ‘laptop’ mode but when in phone mode, it would have the normal keypad with say CFR being 123, VGT being 456 and BHY being 789 and NJU being *0# (using a QWERTY key layout) admitted that the other keys on the front would also need to be either mapped to keys like ZSW or have an even bigger handset. Another option would have been to incorporate a fold out keyboard from the underside but this would either eat into the battery space thus giving less battery life or make the phone even bigger again.

The flash for the camera is nothing to write home about. It is weak and has very short reach. Understandable when you have to power the rest of the phone and still be able to call after a photo shoot in low light conditions. However, Sony Ericsson managed it using Xenon technology rather than LEDs.

This phone suffered from being introduced just before the massive leap in mobiles that was both the Apple iPhone and also the Google G1 (or HTC Dream to give it its official name). It still has, what I consider to be, the best camera on any phone.