Playing with Nokia N92 ie. the mobile TV one

Nokia’s DVB-H “flagship” device, the N92 is not selling yet but I was lucky and got it for the summer to try out. Since there are not too many (p)reviews around yet I thought I’d share some honest thoughts about it. You can argue about the “honest” part me being a Nokia employee, but at least I try

First of all, I haven’t seen DVB-H in action yet so I won’t say anything about that. But stay tuned..

Probably the first thing you notice is that this phone is quite big and heavy. But if you’re willing to forgive that, you get loads of features in a fairly small package. In addition to DVB-H this one has all the bells and whistles of for example, Nokia N80: UMTS, WLAN (with UPnP), 2 cameras, around 40MB internal memory and miniSD card slot, and the list goes on.

The screen is HUGE at about 2,8″ diameter. The resolution is QVGA which some will say is too little for this size, but I say it’s enough. Being a “TV phone” the screen is optimized for video viewing, meaning that black is really black and colours are vivid. Watching a movie or browsing photos with this screen is a pleasure.

One of the benefits of the N92’s size is that it houses a big battery, it’s the same Li-Polymer one that’s in Nokia 9500 Communicator. I won’t say any figures since it’s still not the final software and all, but I’d expect this will last for ages even in heavy use. After all, the battery’s capacity is almost double of that in Nokia N80.

There has been some talks about the keypad, but I say it rocks. It has a rubbery feel to it, that’s very nice. As you can see from the picture above, the numbers switch orientation when in landscape mode. It’s very usable once you get used to it, and I noticed after a while I tend to do most things in the landscape mode because it’s so convenient. It’s similar to Nokia N93, but here the keypad is actually usable in landscape mode.

The main camera is rated 2 megapixels but it’s fixed-focus and not comparable to Zeiss-branded optics of for example N93 or N73. It gives nice enough photos (see below) in ample lighting. The camera application is not the fancy one with fullscreen viewfinder seen on many other multimedia computers, but it gets the job done. Camcorder gives similar results to Nokia N70 for example, so nothing special there.

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Video playback is obviously one of the main use cases for this device, so you can expect good performance there. It’s still not in the same league comparing to latest iPod or PSP but getting pretty close. To be precise, standard MPEG-4 playback handles bitrates upto 512kbps and with AVC upto 384kbps (the latter being one of the standard DVB-H categories). If you need the absolute high-end, go for Nokia N93 or a separate video player.

There are real stereo speakers in the display cover, and some kind of 3D effect can be applied to ringing tones. Speakers sound great for a phone so listening radio or music is a joy. When playing there is a cool spectrum analyzer effect shown in the (tiny) cover display. Othan than changing the volume music playback cannot be controlled in cover closed mode. Music features are otherwise similar to all the other S60 3rd Edition devices, with the exception of Nokia N91 and its special music player.

If you got this far, you notice I found lots to like in N92 even without saying anything about mobile TV. I’ll make a another post about it, once I got some real experiences. In the meanwhile if you have something to say or ask about this device or mobile TV in general, go for it!

-Jukka