Back in 2005, at the time the Nokia N91 appeared to be the geek phone of choice. And that wasn’t down to the fact that it was one of the first Symbian OS 9 and S60 v3 phones. Nor was it the stylish metal casing. Nope, it was the simple fact that this phone has a massive amount of storage. A 4 Gigabyte ‘internal hard drive’ to be precise - most likely along the lines of the Compact Flash based micro drives that were powering the iPod Mini’s of the time. It became an instant object of lust. The Wi-Fi connectivity may have helped as well.

Today with the Nokia N91 already to hit the retail channels, most people are now attracted to the Nokia N80, which has a similar feature set but just looks a lot cooler. Which is a shame because the Nokia N91 is a cracking little phone and could easily be “the phone to recommend” to the consumer if it weren’t for a few worrying little niggles.

Now there’s nothing fundamentally new to the end-user, we’re still in standard 176×208 screen resolution here, so if you’ve been using previous S60 phones there’s no learning curve to get over (apart from the two applications that make the Nokia N91 currently stand out, the music player and the web browser). Built into the Nokia N91, there’s also not the huge range of extra applications found in the upcoming Enterprise devices that have been leading the recent S60 charge. The standard PDA applications are here (Contacts, Calendar, Notes and To-Do– but watch out, as the To-Do application is no longer a separate icon, but part of the Calendar suite. Add in a couple of ancillary applications (Flash Lite player, tutorial application, units converter and calculator), the email client and the aforementioned music player and web browser and you have a rather lean looking smartphone ready for action.

The Nokia N91 is designed for one task, and that’s to be good music phone. This means stuff like Office compatible word processors and Over The Air synchronisation are being left, quite rightly, to the business-focussed devices. Strangely, Push To Talk and Nokia’s Instant Messaging client are still onboard, which indicates that these must now be considered as part of the base package of S60.

Connectivity

With Wi-Fi now on board, a number of small changes have been made in terms of the Connectivity menu. When the Nokia N91 attempts a ‘net connection, you get the familiar dialog to choose which route you want. Previously this was either GSM or GPRS, but at the top of the list you now have an option to scan for WLAN (Wireless Local Area Network – the posh name for Wi-Fi). Choosing this brings up everything in range, plus an icon shows if they are open or require a password key. Given the fun entering that key, you’d be best choosing an open network. And that’s it, it puts you online.

Web Browser

There are two ways of looking at how a mobile web browser should work. The first is that it should give the user every bit of information on the page, make it easy to navigate, and the layout (which is probably designed at least for an 800 pixel wide monitor) should be mangled, squashed, spun and stretched so the user gets one column of information that’s the same width as the screen. This is the approach the Opera browser took. As did Access’ NetFront browser. As did the Java based Reqwireless browser.

Unfortunately Nokia are no longer shipping smartphones with Opera installed, they’ve now got their own web browser, which in part is based on the same core as Apples Safari browser. And while the browser does format columns of text to fit the width of the screen, the ethos of the browser has been to “make it as close to the desktop as possible”.

Music

Now to the main feature – the Nokia N91 as a music player. Glad to say the Nokia N91 is one of the easiest music playback devices to navigate through. This is partly because you’re able to enter search strings with the keypad to narrow down your choice of music. With just under 4GB to play with (roughly 1000 tracks at 4MB each), you can’t rely on scrolling up and down to find what you want. First of all you choose criteria to list the tracks (you can view by Album, Artist, Genre, Composer, or no filtering at all), and from there onto the separate tracks. Then you can put in a search string like ‘MC Hammer’ and have it filtered as you type each character.
There are a couple of sound settings you can play with, but to be honest the default choices on the graphics equaliser will suffice for most people.

The top of the Nokia N91 has a standard 3.5mm stereo headphones jack, so you can ditch the supplied ear buds and proceed with your own favourite headphones – and this is a great step forward. Being able to use your own headphones is a great emotional step, and congratulations to Nokia for finally working this one out.

The only complaint about music playback is that the Nokia N91 (in the same way as the Apple iPod) does not do gapless playback. For a lot of music, this isn’t going to make much of a difference. When a music track ends, there is a slight pause of about half a second while the next track gets ready to play.

Summary

The Nokia N91 feels like a man’s phone. It’s sturdily constructed, and with a metal casing it feels like it can take a fair bit of punishment day to day. It’s also quite a big phone, with no rounded corners or diagonal lines of plastic to break up the shape. This phone means business. The bulge towards the top of the unit, presumably for the microdrive, also carries the camera unit, which seems to be ever so slightly better than the N70 in regular circumstances, but lacking the LED Flash.

But it’s still an incredibly impressive smartphone. A quick straw poll around the pub shows people like the standard candy-bar shape, think it’s a touch heavy, but all proclaim that ‘I have to have that phone’ when you call up the dialog that shows “Music 3.6GB”. 2006 was to be the year that Nokia moved away from the high end into the consumer space, and while the uber-geeks might have moved on to the likes of the N80 and E61, the general public are taking one look at the Nokia N91 and deciding that this is the future of their mobile phone contract. The Nokia N91 deserves every accolade it’s going to pick up.

[Reviewed by Ewan Spence from All About Symbian]