Nokia Putting On The Ritz With N90 Phone

By Joseph Palenchar -- TWICE, 10/24/2005

New York — Nokia will launch its flagship imaging phone, the stainless-steel N90 with a Carl Zeiss lens, exclusively through Ritz.com later this quarter before potentially opening up sales through other outlets.

The N90, a world GSM/EDGE-equipped model, is expected to retail for less than $500 with service contract, a spokeswoman said. It's the industry's first camera phone with Zeiss optics, and it's expected to be available on the T-Mobile network and possibly the Cingular network.

It uses Carl Zeiss optics under an exclusive agreement in which Zeiss supplies small camera phone lenses only to Nokia, a Zeiss spokesman said. "There's more [Nokia camera phones] to come," he added.

The Symbian Series 60 smartphone takes 2-megapixel digital images and stores up to 25 minutes of VHS-quality MPEG-4 moving images on a supplied removable 64MB reduced-size MMC card combined with 31MB of embedded memory. Storage time is extended up to 2.5 hours in the lowest quality mode. Cards with 512MB of memory are also available.

The N90 also plays music in MP3 and unprotected AAC formats. Videos are recorded in stereo, though a single speaker in the phone plays it back only in mono.

In the United States, the N90 operates on 1.9GHz GSM networks, and in other countries, it works on 800/1800MHz GSM networks. It's also equipped to operate on 2.1GHz W-CDMA networks, which are up and running in Europe.

The N series of Symbian Series 60 stainless-steel phones also includes the music-focused N91 and business-oriented N70. The N91, due in the United States in the first quarter, features a 4GB hard drive, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and USB 2.0. The N70 will be the smallest Series 60 phone and includes a 2-megapixel camera, push e-mail, HTML browser, music player and FM radio. U.S. availability hasn't been announced.