Built into the 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 N91 is designed for one task, and that’s to be a damm fine 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 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.

In terms of user practicality, this goes hand in hand with some changes in the Messaging application. Previously you had to choose which Internet connection an email box used in the set-up, now you choose how you want to connect when you say “Open mailbox” and not before. This is much more user friendly. There are lots of small touches like this, and I bet I’ve missed a few of them because S60 is doing the common sense thing when asked.

Music
And so we come to the main feature – the N91 as a music player. There are three things to consider in a good music player… how to get the tracks on to the machine, navigating and playing back the tracks, and how they sound. I’m glad to say the 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. It’s here that the keypad scores, as you can put in a search string like ‘MC Hammer’ and have it filtered as you type each character. Much easier than scrolling, and fast enough to not cause a problem, even when the hard drive is full. Is it better than the scroll wheel on an iPod? Let’s just say it’s comparable and both get the job done in roughly the same amount of time.

It’s when you switch away to do some other task on the N91 that the value of the music player becomes apparent, because it’s still playing, in the background. Not only that, but the playback controls for the music player will continue to work, even if you have slid them down to work with the keypad. So you’re happily working away on an email, and feel the need to change the music? Just hit skip forward (or back) and a little status bar pops up to tell you what is going on. The same happens on changing the volume (which is done from two dedicated volume buttons on the left hand spine of the phone).

From a technical point of view, this isn’t that amazing – it doesn’t need that much processing power to do MP3, and Symbian is a true multitasking operating system with lots of threads running in the background. As a result, I’ve not had playback stutter due to the N91 doing too much. Even with Wi-Fi running, the web browser working on some layout and a number of background applications working away, John Le Hooker was still coming out clear and smooth.

The only complaint about music playback is that the 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. As I said, not a problem to most, but try listening to ‘Dark Side of the Moon’ or ‘American Edit’ and it gets annoying.

The top of the 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. Previously you were restricted to either the supplied headsets or messing around with adapters such as Nokia’s AD-15 or a stereo Bluetooth headset. Now you can crack open the Bose noise-reducing headphones and plug them straight into the N91, or into the ‘remote control’ HS-28 unit (which then plugs into the phone). Being able to use your own headphones is a great emotional step, and congratulations to Nokia for finally working this one out.

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 Package

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. I was surprised to find the unit had a vibrating alarm, given that a number of larger Nokia devices do not have them due to ‘vibration issues’. Given there’s a hard drive in the N91, wouldn’t that be a vibration issue as well? Apparently not.

Probably the only thing missing from the package is space for a memory card, be it MMC, SD, DV RS-MMC, MiniSD, Transmeta Flash, Chromium Dioxide Tape Drives, or whatever flavour Nokia prefer this week. As far as the Operating System is concerned, the hard drive is the external drive. For a first generation product this definitely reduces the engineering, and while people may have an initial reaction of a spinning hard drive getting damaged, it’s worth pointing out this is the same style of drive that sits in the iPod Mini. Of course, they reached 6GB before being discontinued… I wonder how long it will take for someone to strip one of those 6GB drives and hack it into the N91 to see what happens…

The keys on the unit are my only slight gripe. For such a large unit, sliding down the Music Player controls reveals a number of keys that would better grace a calculator from the early eighties. While they do have a positive action, the bottom row is too close to the edge of the slider – your only option is to hit the key directly from above. Because of the spacing, I had to use the side of my thumb to hit the keys, and it’s relatively easy to hit more than one key at a time. Having the application key far up the right hand side of the phone means you don’t have an easy way to reach it in a one handed hold, although this is slightly tempered by the good positioning and styling on the call and soft keys, and by the ‘launch music player’ button on the media controls – when you press this while in the Music Player you get taken to the last application you were in.