THIS week Nokia, the Finnish company that is the No. 1 player in the global mobile communications playground, will be populating the local market with the latest models in its enterprise-driven Eseries line of wireless communications terminals. Of course, you would expect such an occasion to be heralded with the pomp, pageantry and partying that have become typical among the purveyors of technology skewed toward consumers. Then again, there was the matter last week of Apple Inc.’s Steve Jobs and his infamous “reality distortion field” that could send even a respected personal technology columnist for an even more respected newspaper doing something akin to an impromptu videoke on the streets of New York to mark the release of the iPhone. So perhaps Nokia—and every other player in the wireless communications space—could be excused for keeping a relatively low profile in recent days.

Now that everybody has gotten more than an eyeful of Jobs’s little new toy—which, by the way, won’t be available here until sometime next year, we’re told—let’s get down to business, which is exactly what the latest Nokia Eseries smartphones are all about, including the Nokia E90 Communicator which we had the privilege of fiddling with and playing around and testing out over the weekend.

The new Eseries handsets were introduced during the recently concluded 3GSM World Congress 2007 held in Barcelona, Spain. The latest models include the all-inclusive Nokia E90 Communicator, the stylish slider Nokia E65 and the slim e-mail-optimized Nokia E61i device. In a media release, Antti Vasara, senior vice president for Mobile Devices Unit, Enterprise Solutions, Nokia, said: “The tipping point for widespread adoption of business mobility is upon us, and it will take new levels of performance, greater functionality and interoperability, and broad access to mobility solutions beyond the executive suite for customers and operators to realize the benefits of anytime, anywhere productivity and collaboration. Now business users, and the operators and carriers that serve them, can demand a new standard of business devices combining both beauty and brains without compromise, and that is what Nokia Eseries delivers.”

 “We’re making it easy for business professionals to get mobilized. Feedback from our customers shows that we are changing the way business is conducted in a mobile world. Building on the success of our first generation of Nokia Eseries, we are responding to the growing requirements of business customers with a new generation of Nokia Eseries devices that will exceed their expectations and deliver an uncompromised experience,” Vasara continued.

Now, we don’t know about the other new Nokia Eseries handsets but as far as the E90 Communicator is concerned, what Mr. Vasara is pretty much spot-on. In fact, given the smartphone’s form factor and the usual tasks that the average consumer performs on his home or office PC—surf the Web, check e-mail, do IM, watch online and offline videos, listen to music, work on documents and spreadsheets, not necessarily in that order—this all-inclusive baby is far more richly deserving of Nokia’s recent stunning marketing campaign for the N95 about “what the PC has become.”

Even a cursory glance at the E90 Communicator’s specs quickly underscores the business orientation of the handset: connectivity to just about all the standard and high-speed networks out there, allowing you to be a true mobile workhorse perusing the Internet and corporate networks at speeds once available only at your office workstation; support for a variety of e-mail solutions, including the usual POP and IMAP, plus Blackberry Connect and Mail for Microsoft Exchange; GPS, so that you will always know where you are in whatever part of the world, and how to get from point to point minus all the fuss and muss; a suite of productivity tools including Adobe PDF, QuickOffice, Team Suite for collaborative work, and Nokia Search, which is not unlike Google Desktop Search gone mobile.

Of course, somebody once said that “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”—or in the case of Stephen King’s Jack Torrance, murderously insane—and obviously Nokia believes as much. So, along with all that serious productivity software are stuff for some serious fun: video and audio streaming (3GPP and Real Media), music player, media player, FM radio, 3.0-megapixel camera with autofocus (which, unlike you know what, can also record video; also, there’s a second built-in camera for video conferencing) and the (X)HTML Nokia Browser based on Apple’s Safari Web kit, which displays Web pages as they are meant to be viewed (not unlike on you know what).

Now, this sort of Web-page rendering may have gotten a lot of props from the tech media but we do have our reservations. As with the iPhone, viewing Web pages on the Nokia E90 requires a lot of scrolling here and there, and zooming in and out, and—to be fair—the application is intelligent enough to make all that quite useful using the handset’s five-way D-pad (the cursor intelligently locks onto hyperlinks as you navigate through a Web page with the D-pad). That said, there’s still a lot of scrolling and zooming involved, which from where we sit is not the most efficient way of perusing Internet content on-the-go. Sure, the implementation of Web content on most other smartphones like, say, our Palm Treo 680 with its NetFront browser, which “reformats” the content to fit into the wireless terminal’s limited viewing real estate, doesn’t do justice to how a site may have been laid-out and formatted. Still, scrolling up or down makes for a far more efficient way of viewing content than scrolling and zooming all over the place. Then again, this is a matter of personal preference.

Back to the Nokia E90 Communicator: Skewing to the handset’s business orientation, Nokia’s designers have kept the aesthetic elements within the realm of the stylishly discreet, the rectangular clamshell form factor burnished to a handsome matte mocha (well, at least the loaner we used; supposedly, there are implementations in silver and black, and even red), while the hardware engineers ensured robust mechanisms that make for a solid experience in handling the terminal. Sure, the E90 isn’t going to give the iPhone or the Motorola Razr any competition in society’s obsession with anorexic proportions, but it nonetheless looks and feels sleek. Needless to say, the QWERTY keyboard is solid.

As for the ease-of-use, well, the E90 Communicator—which is now based on the Symbian OS S60 platform—is a Nokia after all, and the Finnish company didn’t become the No.1 wireless communications player for putting out unwieldy technology. Enough said.

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