Playing around with Nokia's N92 TV Phone

Nokia N92

Nokia N92

Nokia N92

Last week in New York I had the chance to play around with Nokia's new N92, their N90'ish DVB-H TV capable handset. The unit in the photos here was picking up a live signal from a transmitter in the hotel (photo on the next page). We were able to watch CNN and a number of other channels on it. The image quality was quite good.

The pre-production unit we were using had most of the basic functionality working, as you can see, but did have a few issues. The channel selection list didn't show complete information, for one, and there were delays when switching from TV to camera mode. But overall, everything worked.

The big issues for most people are going to be the size and weight of the unit and the keypad. At 191g (6.7oz), it weighs more than many PDA phones. That's pretty heavy. It is also about the same size as a N90, though a bit wider and shorter. The keypad is very odd, being something like a rubber mat over top of a series of buttons. The feel is not that great, and when configured for TV viewing, the hinge makes getting at the softkey buttons quite difficult.

[A Nokia engineer that I met at the event has since informed me that the keypad for the N92 has been updated in a few ways. He tells me that the feel of the keypad has been improved to make it more like traditional keypads, and that the entire keypad has been moved a few millimeters to the right to alleviate the problem with accessing the softkeys when the device is in TV viewing mode. -editor]

But no matter what, the N92 is certainly a cool piece of kit. There are few DVB-H trials running in the US at the moment, so it seems very unlikely that we will ever see it on these shores, but we will see the N92 for sale in several European countries next year.

You'll find more photos of the Nokia N92 on the following page.

Nokia N92

Nokia N92

Nokia N92

 

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