Putting a camera onto the Communicator range has always been a bit hit and miss – when the 9300 came out, the big missing feature was the camera, because businesses (apparently) didn’t want enterprise devices to have a camera. With the E61, the same argument, although times are changing and the reality of 'hey, most phones have cameras now and anyway, don't we trust our staff' seems to be more common - the E61i did pick up a lens in the redesign.
Bulk is certainly not an issue in the E90, so the addition of a 3 megapixel ‘regular’ camera (i.e. without one of the swish Carl Zeiss lenses) is not much of a surprise – and maybe the addition lifts the E90 out of the total enterprise focus into the realms of regular power user.
Now, to my eye, there’s very little difference between the E90 and the N95 on taking pictures – I carried them side by side yesterday during the Fringe and the comparison pictures are shown here. Now this isn’t a great big technical description of why, because (as is legendary) my ability to take any sort of halfway decent picture with a camera is right up there with Stevie Wonder. The only real difference (and Steve’s in depth look at the E90's camera agrees) is that the colour is slightly washed out on the E90, compared to the same image on the N95:
E90 photos on the left, N95 photos on the right, click through or download images to view the original JPG photos
Note that the N95's camera was set at 3 megapixels, for ease of comparison of the E90/N95 optics. The N95's camera is capable of higher resolution, 5 megapixels, of course
But overall I’d be happy to rely on the camera in the E90 for Flickr and ‘grab a pic right now’ moments. Video capture is also available, at 'DVD like quality' – it’s certainly more than usable for home video, even YouTube uploads (using third party applications such as Shozu) if your clips are short enough and you have the necessary mobile bandwidth (and there's always the option to capture at 352 by 288 pixel resolution, at which size video clips are around four times smaller per minute).
The media section (music, gallery, RealPlayer) is pretty much all the regular S60 standard – one huge advantage of moving to this UI is that these have been fairly well tested and tweaked over the years. There’s no stereo microphone (as on the N93) but frankly that’s not a huge compromise and certainly one I can live with.
One benefit to the E90 is the clarity of the camera viewfinder – when closed, the external screen takes this role, and at QVGA (320x240 pixel) and with such a small screen pushing the pixels very close together, the viewfinder is crystal clear and sharp – which, given my limited skills, is useful.
One of the few things I didn’t test properly was music playback – running around capturing audio and reviewing all day at the Fringe meant that I was sticking to tried and tested minidisk for recording and I didn't really have time to sit down and chill. But the quick play I did have with Music player (which Steve helpfully mapped to one of the 'My own' keys on the inside keyboard) showed that, to my ears, it's certainly up to the job for occasional use.
It’s no surprise to me that the E90 performs well in a media role – it’s one of the strong points of S60 as a whole and I think that it would be very hard to cock up the camera/video pairing on any of the newer devices. It’s certainly a far sight better than the limited suite the Nokia 9500 carried, and the resolution on the camera (3.2 megapixel compared to VGA on the 9500) is far and away superior to anything else that has come before on any Qwerty-based devices.
Whether the E90 actually needs this level of multimedia support depends on the end-user, and that (along with the general convergence of the device) is something I’ll touch on in my summary of my time with the E90 in my next article. I'll also be looking at my feelings upon returning to the Nokia 9300 after my month with the E90...
-- Ewan Spence, 15 August 2007
[Postscript from Steve (editor) - I added the caption about camera resolution because it's important to bear in mind that the N95 has extra pixel oomph in its pocket. Some of the N95-taken photos that I've managed with the latest N95 firmware at the full 5 megapixel resolution have been stunning(!) The extra contrast and colour accuracy that's possible with proper professional glass optics is evident in the photos comparisons above, although I agree with Ewan that the difference isn't much of a difference for entirely casual photography (or video recording). Still, that Carl Zeiss name is worth bearing in mind when weighing up camera-equipped devices.]