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Among the other goodies are the Real Player for video and sound clips, Movie Director for creating your own mini movies, Web browser (sites render wonderfully on the high resolution screen), voice recorder, comprehensive unit converter, Nokia’s LifeBlog client for maintaining your own Web based picture-blog, and more.

One of my favourites is the Gallery application that shows your pictures and videos in a display that offers six mini thumbnails and one larger one. You scroll through the thumbnails with the navigation button, and they move round in a circular fashion. When the one you want to view is showing as the large thumbnail, select it to blow it up to full screen.

A music player does a pretty good job with MP3 and AAC formats. I found the N90’s speaker good enough to listen to for short periods and the provided headset pretty good too – just as well as Nokia’s Pop Port connector means you can’t use an alternative set.

Nokia has missed a trick when it comes to internal storage, which is extremely limited at just 31MB. You’ll eat this up pretty quickly if you shoot stills at the highest possible resolution and don’t consistently transfer them off the N90, using either Bluetooth or the provided PC Suite software. It’s also a pretty paltry amount of storage if you want to use the N90 for music playback. Nokia provides a 64MB RS-MMC card, which these days is insultingly low capacity. It sits in a slot on the right edge of the casing for easy swapping, and is protected by a hinged cover.

There is another annoyance, which will matter more to some than others, in the absence of a vibrating alert, and another in the fact that the battery life isn’t wonderful. For a 3G handset so well suited to extensive use (memory capacity notwithstanding) you should budget for daily charging.

Pricing is reasonable for such a feature-rich handset – on a £30 per month contract you can pick the N90 up for £49.99. If you go for a more expensive contract you’ll be able to pick it up for nothing.

Verdict

It is pretty certain that you are going to be drawn to the N90 primarily for its imaging features, and will grow into the great screen and other software as time goes on. It’s just a pity that the handset is short on memory and doesn’t have an optical zoom component.

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