Nokia N91: Let the music play

This baby can definitely carry a tune. Make that 3,000 tunes.

One of the latest additions to Nokia’s N Series family of multimedia handsets, the N91 is a true music phone – a hard-disk based unit optimized for high quality digital audio playback.

Another must-have gadget in my opinion. Okay, maybe we have too many gadgets that we need a backpack to carry them all, but if you’re going to change your phone this year (or this month anyway), might as well be something that’s not just a phone.

Let’s admit it, the digital age has totally redefined the in-crowd.And spotting members of this crowd is easy – a high-end cell phone in one hand and an MP3 player connected to mug-me-white earphones in the other.

So marrying a 3G-capable Nokia phone to an iPod comes as no surprise and a piece of good news.

For one thing, the union spares us from the burden of having to carry multiple sets of cables and chargers.

But what sets the N91 apart from most phones is the massive amount of storage – a monster of a hard drive that lies within its stylish stainless-steel casing.

For this model, Nokia has abandoned the memory card, replacing it with a 4-gigabyte hard disk. It also comes with an additional phone memory of 30 megabytes for contacts, calendar and text messages.

The high storage capacity translates to a ton of tunes, a feature that has made the Apple iPod superior to other pocket MP3 players on the market.The N91 boasts of being able to store almost 3,000 music tracks in several formats, including MP3, AAC, Real, WAV, WMA and M4A.

The capacity, however, is likely based on compressed encoding. A more realistic estimate would be 1,000 songs at 4MB per track with higher sound quality encoding.

That still leaves you with a lot of tracks to designate as ring tones, if you choose to do so. At 160 grams, it’s one of the heavier Nokia models. The unit looks and feels rock solid, one of a few cell phones made almost completely out of metal.

The functional keys include a five-position navigational scroller (let’s just call it a joystick, okay?), which is quite useful in going through hundreds of stored tunes.

The keypad with blue backlight can be accessed by pulling down the front panel where the music player keys are located.

While the N91’s music player can’t compare to the iPod’s scrollwheel, the presence of a keypad gives it an advantage. Typing the first letters of the song title or artist, like you would in searching for contacts in your phone directory, allows the user to quickly play a track, especially in a playlist with numerous entries.The front controls also come with a quick music access key for quick toggling from phone to player function.

Gone is Nokia’s traditional method of locking the phone (pressing the lock and asterisk keys) – it's been replaced by an a iPod-style hold switch at the top of the unit, which is quite practical since the numeric keypad is now hidden under a sliding cover.

Owners of previous Nokia models using the Symbian Series 60 operating system will have no problem navigating through the menus. The OS is third edition, but I saw no significant changes from previous versions.

Presented in high resolution display (176 x 208 pixels), the user interface is easy to master – a Nokia trademark that has long been attributed to the appeal of the brand. The Nokia N91 sports a 2-megapixel camera which shoots stills at resolutions of up to 1600 x 1200 and records video MPEG4 and RealVideo formats.

So the next question is: Will the battery last? Well, yes, it has a standby power of 190 hours (Is there anyone who leaves a phone idle for that long?) while talk time is up to four hours and playback time is up to 10.

Jack Of All Trades

A big thank you to Nokia for finally integrating a standard 3.5-mm stereo headset jack into the handset, which takes away the cumbersome dongles or adapters. This means you are no longer restricted to the headsets or earphones that come in the box, although the supplied buds with remote were surprisingly good. Audio was clear and managed to bring out the N91’s hi-fi capability and true potential as a music player.

To further improve sound quality are several settings, you can tweak under playback options, including stereo widening and an eight-band equalizer.

With the standard jack, however, you can now plug in your professional headphones or use the auxiliary jacks on your speaker systems and simply let it rip – like music lovers seemingly angry at the world do. Or maybe they just like really loud music.

Incidentally, among the additional accessories on the Nokia N91 website is a selection of headphones and portable speakers from manufacturers, namely Bose, JBL and Sennheiser.

I had the N91 subjected to a battery of system tests, starting off with Bose Triport headphones, a Bose Companion 2 desktop speaker system, a Pioneer Stereo CD tuner and finally a 1,000-watt, Logitech Z-680 THX 5.1 system, which I use for my PC.

The sound just blew me away and playback was excellent for MP3s. But for pure, crisp and noise-reduced sound with all the highs and lows, using pro headphones is the only way to go.

Plugged in to a high-end system or headset, you wouldn’t be able to tell that the sound source is actually a mobile phone…Unless it starts ringing.

And when it does, the music track actually pauses and resumes where you left off after you complete your call. If you want uninterrupted listening, simply switch the N91 to offline mode in the profiles menu.

However, the sound experience doesn’t end with the music player. The N91, like previous models, comes with FM radio and Real Player for video playback. As a special bonus, the N91 is preloaded with exclusive video clips from the series of Live8 concerts held in 2005, featuring Greenday, Coldplay and U2, among others. My wife Tanya, who loves the song Seven Seconds, watched the Live 8 clip over and over until it was time to recharge the battery.

Maximum Connectivity

Connectivity is in abundance in the N91, which offers 3G, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi 802.11 for wireless LAN and USB 2.0 for high-speed data transfer.

Bluetooth allows easy sharing of tracks and videos between two handhelds, which obviously can’t be done with regular MP3 players.

The real strength of a multimedia player, however, is the ability to transfer your favorite tunes or even your entire music collection to the unit.

I put the N91 to the test by transferring MP3s from a PC to the unit using all available options, including wireless pairing over Bluetooth and USB.

Once plugged to the PC via USB, a menu flashes on the phone and offers three available options – Media Player, PC Suite or Mass Storage.

Transferring files is child’s play since it involves the simple drag-and-drop method.

Personally, I prefer using the Windows Media Player since it allows file synchronization similar to PDAs and the iPod. However, I had to go to the Nokia website and download the plug-in that would allow WMP to recognize the N91. But when I tried transferring MP3 files from my wife's Mac iBook, the phone froze and deleted the playlists (but not the library). Nokia really is more in sync with PC.

In selecting a good music player, I often look for three things – storage capacity, sound quality and ease of transferring tracks.The N91 passes on all three, making it a superior music player – and not just for a phone.

One would think that being a phone/music player, the N91 would be a navigation nightmare. Surprisingly, it is one of the easiest devices to navigate through, a clear sign that the marriage works.