Finally. How many years have I been talking about cell phone cameras replacing traditional point and shoot models? But the industry moves so slowly! It's been so frustrating. Like monitoring the pitch drop experiment.

Anyway, it looks like Nokia has finally done it. The N93 is packing a 3.2 megapixel, 3x optical zoom, mechanical shutter, auto-focus Vario-Tessar lens camera. It's not going to be as good as your brand new digitcam, but it's going to be good enough I think.

The transformer style swivel phone allows for configuration in a mini video camera mode, and can take decent vga quality video at 30 fps. And while Nokia has had photo uploading capabilities for a while (tied into their lifeblog system,) these new offerings come with flickr support baked in. Very cool.

Plus, this thing has "802.11b/g connectivity, a TV output capability, an FM radio, and EDGE data support in addition to the triband GSM and UMTS capabilities...." Nice. (Will an American carrier really ship it with 802.11 support? Color me still slightly skeptical.)

On the down side, it is pretty big. More photos are here. I don't mind it, but some people will be turned off by the somewhat clunky design. For them Nokia has the more traditional candy bar style N73 which sports the same great camera.

Of course it's not actually out yet. :-( Looks like some time in July. Not sure I can wait that long as my need for a new phone is rather desperate. If the treo 700p drops in May I will probably jump. But at least my *next* phone after that really is going to replace the digital camera that I don't have yet either (but that's another story.)

Good job Nokia.
- jim 4-26-2006 7:24 pm

Damn, I'd say sign me up for the N73 but I have a habit of losing cell phones.
- steve 4-26-2006 10:30 pm


Here in Europe, we also have the choice of the Sony Ericsson K800i, which has a 3.2 megapixel with autofocus. Not nearly the features of the Nokia, but the size is close enough to the perfect size of my old T610 and T630.
- Spamhuntress (guest) 5-01-2006 4:37 pm


Yeah, that k800i is super nice as well (as was the k750.) The T610 variants were the first really beautiful phone I thought. I still can't figure out why the good phones take *so* long to come to the U.S. If my ancestors had just stayed in Norway I wouldn't have this problem! :-)
- jim 5-01-2006 7:36 pm





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