I was most interested to hear Andrew Orlowski's comments on the Nokia E90 Communicator in last week's podcast, but felt that I just had to jump and defend what dubbed the 'Cargo Cult' communicator. Here's my analysis of the E90's interface and raison d'être...

"AAS podcast 27 was a bit of a must listen, to be honest, with the around-as-long-as-me Andrew Orlowski voicing his opinions on the downfall of Psion, the creation of EPOC and Symbian and also, specifically, his views on the Nokia E90 Communicator, the most revent in the classic clamshell line. Now, I respect Andrew's opinions and, to be honest, I can see where he's coming from, but I'd like to address some of his criticisms and stake my corner in the E90's defense.

"Cynical"? "Cargo Cult"? "Doing it on the cheap"?

So Nokia had a loyal following for its 9300 and 9500 Communicators. And here they are producing another in the line, looking similar but with a very different user interface and applications. I can see why someone steeped in Series 80 on the 9300/9500 would feel shocked by the complete change under the hood, but, and we've mentioned this before on AllAboutSymbian, Nokia had very little option when conceiving the E90. Series 80 was too tied up with Symbian OS 7.0, circa 2003 and 2004, and here they were developing a new Communicator for 2007, with Symbian OS 9.0 (and higher) now the required standard for modern devices, not least because of the need for HSDPA/3G support, not to mention the new Platform Security system and support for the real time, single chip OS kernel. Nokia's a big outfit, but it was still deemed wasteful to pour large amounts of effort into bringing Series 80 up to speed and then maintaining it, when resources could be concentrated into just S60 and have this serve both purposes. "

 Read on...