| Nokia E90 | i-Mate Ultimate 9502 | |
| Form factor | Clamshell | Transverse Slider |
| Weight | 210g | 200g |
| Display | 800 by 352 pixels inner screen, plus QVGA outer screen. Most S60 applications work, though few use the whole screen efficiently |
640 by 480 pixels touch-screen, hard to read in sunlight. Most applications run in a smooth QVGA form, you have to manually enable high resolution browsing in Internet Explorer and then the text is too small to read. Even photo viewing doesn't use the whole screen |
| Comms | Quad band, HSDPA, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Infrared | Quad band, HSDPA, 3G, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth |
| Interface | S60 3rd Edition, Symbian OS 9 - see WM6 description to the right(!) - S60 isn't quite as klunky, it's quicker but the app support isn't as wide. |
Windows Mobile 6 Professional - clunky all the time, sometimes painfully slow, but with wide application support |
| Navigation | GPS, Nokia Maps (plus Google Maps and other solutions) |
GPS, no software included, Google Maps works fine though |
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| Keyboard | 8cm (q to p) qwerty keyboard, fairly stiff keys, small travel, dedicated number key row |
5.5cm qwerty thumb keyboard, keys have good feel but are wastefully tiny |
| Stills camera |
3 megapixels, LED flash, photo quality very good (here showing 1:1 fragments at the centre of a full 3 megapixel photo):
Camera lens protected by plastic rim |
3 megapixels, LED flash, photo quality is utterly awful:
Camera lens proud of device bottom, open to immediate scratching. Not that it'll make photos any worse - that just wouldn't be possible! |
| Video camera | Full VGA resolution, 30 frames per second, good quality | 352 by 288 pixels, 15 frames per second, poor audio and picture quality |
| Audio out |
2.5mm smartphone jack, stereo speakers |
2.5mm smartphone jack, mono speaker |
| Controllers | External d-pad great, internal one adequate | Very cheap and wobbly d-pad and main phone controls |
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| Battery |
1500mAh, 2 days of moderately heavy use |
1660mAh, 2 days of moderately heavy use |
| Office | Quickoffice 3 built-in, later versions to come in future firmwares. Adequate but not perfect Office editing |
Office Mobile built-in, on a par with Quickoffice overall. Adequate but not perfect. |
| Browser | S60 Web based on Webkit, full desktop browsing (now with Flash Lite 3 as well in latest beta firmware) | Pocket Internet Explorer is getting very tired now. PIE 7 will be here in a year's time and brought more up to date, but in the meantime the browsing experience is both slower and much worse than any other mobile browser |
| Multimedia | Music playback great but fiddly control (though setting one of the 'My own' buttons to Music player helps), all formats supported | Music playback good, but more limited format support and even more fiddly control |
| Software scene | S60 3rd Edition has a good app base now, but not all programs work well on the large screened E90. Game support is particularly sparse. | A wealth of third party apps, including hundreds of games and vertical apps for companies. |
| Expansion | microSD, up to 32GB | microSD, up to only 2GB (no SDHC support) |
You'll get a sense from the above text that the E90 comes out an easy winner overall, despite being by no means a perfect product itself. The i-Mate Ultimate 9502 simply loses too many points with its appalling camera, appalling d-pad and unnecessarily miniscule keyboard.
Moreover, the use of a VGA screen in Windows Mobile is simply handled badly. If you thought the way E90 adapted S60 was poorly thought out, then VGA in WinMob 6 is worse. Most applications display their interfaces in exactly the same way as on QVGA, just wirh smoother fonts. The end result is pretty, but it's a criminal waste. And then some applications, such as the web browser, have a 'hi-res' mode, which displays everything in 1:1 on the VGA screen rather than pixel-doubling elements. This results in content which is too tiny to be read properly. What's needed is more intelligent handling of VGA by the operating system, with screen elements and fonts which are smaller and more flexible than those in the QVGA system but not as unusable as those in a 1:1 VGA environment. The end result should be more content on-screen and yet still readable. Rant over....
If it's hard to recommend the Nokia E90, in that it's an arguably niche device, then it's much harder still to recommend the i-Mate Ultimate 9502. Not only is it a niche device, it's one that's poorly realised, with some cheap components spoiling the otherwise impressive metal build.
Steve Litchfield, 23 April 2008, All About Symbian
PS. Watch for a video review of the 9502 in Smartphones Show 58.