CONSUMERMAN and the Nokia 8890 Dual-Band World Phone

CONSUMERMAN's travels have included trips abroad in increasing numbers, and being the connected kind of person he is, he determined that he must upgrade to at least a dual-band cell telephone that would work almost any on the planet. Research (and a preference for Nokia due to past experiences) resulted in the selection of the Nokia 8890 digital 'world-phone.'

(To read about the travails CONSUMERMAN underwent just to obtain the unit, read the rant about 'CONSUMERMAN and AffordablePhones.Com.')

After hardships unnumbered, CONSUMERMAN was finally in possession of the object of his latest techno-whizzy desire. And CONSUMERMAN was impressed.

Good Stuff

The 8890 is very small; it can almost be hidden in the palm of the hand, and fits in a shirt pocket without protruding. Despite its small size, the battery provides a very respectable 2 hours of talk time and 6 days of standby time. For improved reception in signal-poor areas, there is an embedded pull-out antenna. The button at the tip of the antenna is faired into the body very nicely, so it is easy to extract but does not catch on things when not in use.

The telephone supports 'voice tags' for numbers, meaning that you can record a name or phrase of up to 1.5S and associate it with a number, and later dial the number by speaking the phrase. The main drawback to this is that one of the buttons on the telephone must be pressed and held for a few seconds before the telephone will switch into tag-recognition mode, which makes this little better than a slightly clunkier one-button speed dialing option. The circumstances under which CONSUMERMAN would want to use voice recognition would be precisely those in which he would not want to have to fiddle with buttons.

The button pad is considerably smaller than that of the Nokia 5120, CONSUMERMAN's previous cell telephone, but the entire unit is smaller so that is to be expected. Dialing is really no more difficult; the 8890's buttons are in relief rather than flush, so they can be used by feel without visual confirmation. There are two buttons associated with menu usage, as opposed to the single one used by the 5120, which can lead to frustration at first when one button switches from 'select' to 'cancel' between menu stages. However, this is mainly an issue of digital (phalangeal) memory, and just requires time to overcome.

One nice feature of the 8890 is the sliding cover. When closed, it covers the button pad (good for avoiding accidental dialing); when open, it brings the microphone into proximity to the mouth for speaking. It can be opened with one hand, with a little practice. Opening it when a call is incoming answers it, so there is no chance of disconnecting or accepting too soon when funbling the unit off your belt. Closing the cover disconnects the current call. These features obviate having to fiddle with buttons, which CONSUMERMAN considers a Good Thing. The open/close behaviours are customisable to a certain extent, as well. CONSUMERMAN definitely regards the sliding cover as superiour to the flip-phone paradigm.

The rapid-charger unit does an excellent job, charging the battery from nil to full charge in less than two hours. The drop-in chargin stand is nice, as well, dispensing with the need to twiddle plugs and jacks and worry about connecting the charger to the headset outlet.

As is common these days, the 8890 includes lots of different pre-programmed ring signals. (Unfortunately the list is not a proper superset of those built into the 5120, so CONSUMERMAN had to change his ring.) In addition, it has slots for several additional signals, although the format and obtainability are a 'see your carrier' notation in the user's guide.

The 8890 uses an audio jack for the headset connexion, which is a definite improvement over the custom fiddly connector used by the 5120.

The telephone includes an infrared port, which is very cool. It can be used to upload and download aspects of the unit's configuration to and from a PC with the appropriate hardware and software, and you can actually beam a telephone number or calendar event into the telephone from your PDA. You can also beam data from the 8890 to your PDA.

Issues

On the semi-downside, the 8890's use of an audio jack for the headset connexion makes the chances fairly high that you will need to buy a new headset if you are currently using an older Nokia model. In addition, the 8890 is so small that it appears there is no real belt-holster suitable for it available (CONSUMERMAN was not impressed with the photograph of the one available from NokiaUSA). As a consequence, CONSUMERMAN is currently just dropping his 8890 into the Belken holster he used for his 5120 and letting it rattle around in that. (See the rant on 'CONSUMERMAN on the Belken Cellphone Holster.')

While the number of name/number associations that can be stored (and presumably the number of voice tags as well) is a function of the SIM card, the 8890's search function for its internal directory only displays a limited number of characters. So if you have entries for 'John Smith at his Home' and 'John Smith at his Office', chances are good that you will not be able to tell them apart in the directory listing due to truncation. The truncation point is distressingly short; only 12 characters.

Both the charger jack and the headset jack are located on the botton of the unit, which is a little unfortunate -- it is easy to get them nominally confused (although they are of different sizes), and using the headset extends the unit's length by about half an inch. When dropping the telephone into a shirt pocket, with the headset attached it is less convenient than otherwise. However, if the headset jack were on the side it would be worse, and if it were on the top all sorts of schmutz would be likely to drop into it. CONSUMERMAN expects this placement option is the least of evils.

Non- or Mis-features

Unfortunately, when beaming numbers from a PDA into the 8890, the latter sometimes chooses to only use part of the PDA-supplied name when storing the number (such as only the first or the last name). Be sure to double-check the name for completeness before completing the save operation on the telephone. Similarly, the amount of information transferred whem beaming calendar events may be less than expected.

As is apparently the case with most recent digital cellular telephone units, the Nokia 8890 comes equipped with games. CONSUMERMAN expects this is a consequence of excess ROM capacity and engineers with fried brains. Why on the planet anyone would waste battery charge playing a game on its telephone leaves CONSUMERMAN completely baffled. However, the games are there if it makes sense to you.

There are a number of other features supported by the Nokia 8890, such as a calendar, but CONSUMERMAN prefers to use his PDA for such and has not tried the 8890's versions out. A brief test reveals that calendar notes may be beamed to and from the telephone just like telephone numbers, though, just in case you are interested in using the phone's version.

Conclusion

CONSUMERMAN is very pleased with his Nokia 8890, and recommends it unreservedly. Of course, he has yet to try it out abroad, so stay tuned for a report on its usability in an international setting.