Nokia E90 or HTC Tytn II

[IBM]

My Nokia 9500 is coming to the end of it's life, and I'm thinking about an upgrade. While I'd like to stay loyal to the Communicator series (love the design, just wish they'd do a Razr on it and make it less brick like) I really like the Tytn and think it'll offer about the same usability, but a little more pleasing on the eye, and with a Windows OS which should make sync a lot easier.

I know there's plenty of people on here who know the HTC stuff, but if anyone's used the E90 I'd like to hear what they have to say...

...and if anyone can think of any alternative suggestions with similar functionality, it'd be good to hear. I'm in Singapore in a couple of days, and they've always got good deals on mobiles. Think I saw the HTC Touch Dual there when I passed through last week.

[Funkstar]

I can't offer anything on E90, I don't know the Nokia lineup at all these days.

But i have just sorted myself out with a TyTN II on t-mobile.

Sync works extremely well on Vista, much better than my old P990i ever did. I'm using my TyTN as a modem right now. Connecting and uing it as a modem is dead simple. very impressed by how easy it was.

The only critisism is the TyTN is a lot heavier than i though it was going to be. It is smaller than my P990i but does weigh more.

[IBM]

My mind was made up for me. I've ended up with an E90.

I'd really begun to think that the Tytn was the right phone for me, but my father in law gave me an E90 as a gift over the christmas period. Can't really argue with that.

Initial impressions....a very nice phone, certainly a great improvement over the 9500. It's certainly a much neater package than the 9500, little bit smaller and the metal casing makes a whole lot of difference to the feel of the phone. Very polished with a good weight too it. Unfortunately this becomes a disadvantage when you put it in your pocket, as this is still a very big phone, and all that weight makes you look like a mid-80s stock broker.

The revised nokia interface is a great improvement, very similar to the one I used on a Nokia N82 recently. The system flows very smoothly between the outside screen and the inside one, and both are of excellent quality, something which is made obvious through the use of the pretty good camera (for both images and video), and also from the game it came with (don't know what graphic hardware is built in, but certainly the best I've seen on any of the communicator series).

I'm not persuaded by the keyboard, however, which has always been the main selling point of the previous phones in the range. It's just too hard, the buttons have virtually no travel, and they're very tightly packed together. While I'm on the subject of buttons, the four that border the screen just look out of place. They're too small and just don't look right, you get the feeling they should have been bigger, or the screen should have been.

The wireless network adaptor doesn't seem particularly powerful, but when it's obviously jammed in with so much other tech, it's a wonder it works at all. Even so, when it did manage to find a network, transfer speeds were pretty respectable, and the internal screen did a great job of rendering websites.

So glad to see that nokia managed to incorporate a straightforward MP3 player into this phone, as this has been a major gripe of mine for some time. They've also got the radio and voice recorder sorted out, which is nice to see, although I've not had a chance to try the former, having only used the external speakers for music playback (those of you who know will be aware of Nokia's predilection for forcing users to utilise the headphones are the external antenna).

Battery life on the Nokia communicator range has always been good, and this doesn't look like being an exception, although it's still too early too tell. I've certainly had this playing music, making calls, and connecting to wireless network and not seen the battery drop by even a single bar. This will change over time of course, but it's reassuring all the same.

All in all, a pleasant upgrade from the 9500 (doesn't ever get better value than free after all) and has delayed my desire to move to a windows mobile platform for the time being. Who knows, maybe it'll rekindle that initial attraction to the format.