The first paragraph is brilliant and needs to be quoted:
It’s important to stress right at the outset that the Nokia N93i is NOT, repeat NOT an upgrade to the N93, nor is it supposed to be. The N93i is an evolution of the original design, to be sure, and the main point is that it’s much slimmer and more visually appealing, thus attracting people who would have dismissed the original bulk of the N93. It remains to be seen how long the N93 stays available for, but I’d guess that the two can coexist happily for a while. As to which I’d buy if I was new to the scene and had the money, I’m honestly torn, since there are a number of compromises made in the N93i design that will annoy anyone determined to buy the ‘flagship’ S60 smartphone.
Here are some more snippets:
There are spidery rubber inlays to improve grip and give you a better sense of where the key boundaries are in the dark. Although this largely works well and there’s a definite ‘click’, the amount of force needed to effect each keypress is fairly high and the N93i isn’t as useable as its predecessor when it comes to text entry. I also didn’t like the way there were no dividers between the Green/Edit and (more vitally) C/Red ‘keys’, it’s going to be quite easy to go for ‘C’ and hit the hangup button by mistake, thus ending the application you’re in.
In the Nokia N93, the noise reduction seemed to be largely turned off, with the result that images were very crisp but horribly full of artefacts if you zoomed in very closely. For the N93i, there’s far more noise reduction applied, with the result that artefacts (i.e. detail that isn’t really there in the first place) get blurred out, to hopefully result in a more pleasing picture, even if the photo isn’t apparently quite as crisp as the same image taken on the original N93.
I found the speed of auto-focus to be far quicker on the N93i than on the N93, a real boon as speed of focus has always been an N93 gripe.
[That alone makes me want to trade in the N93 I got at CES; you have no clue how long it takes to focus. I’m used to my lightning fast dinky little Canon. The N93 is a snail!]
The stereo microphones have been dropped on the N93i and it’s mono only, sadly. Being able to record in immersive stereo was one of the highlights of using the N93 as a camcorder and I’m sad to see only the single microphone here.
When using the N93 day to day with a reasonable amount of photography or filming, I was often out of power by nightfall. To have battery capacity reduced is definitely cause for concern.
Source: All About Symbian
This weekend I plan to write my post CES write up, and I’ll blog that on or around Tuesday. Why Tuesday? That seems to be when my blog traffic peaks and I want that post to be noticed by a larger crowd than usual. I have quite a few things to say about all the products Nokia launched at CES but then again all my conclusions are going to be made after mere minutes fiddling with said devices.
Steve has had this thing for a while so I would definitely check out what he has to say, especially since you should know by now I mainly post the negatives highlighted by reviews. Sprinkling in a little positives here and there helps me not look like a total cynic.
(But I am)