A few weeks ago I was at JavaOne in San Francisco. I've got the Flickr set if you want to see some narrated photos . Although there isn't there much about the show. Basically the biggest reason I went was to present with Nokia's Jaana Majakangas for JSR-257. I demoed semacode's SDK running on my trusty S710, the Nokia N93 and a SavaJe Jasper.

In order to prepare for the demo I borrowed the N93 and played around with it a bit. It's a prototype so there might be some fit & finish between the one I used and the final, but it was a pretty cool phone. If I had to sum it up in one work it would be this. This is a big phone. And that's not only physically but in terms of features too.

I mean, what do you say about a phone where the optical package is the size of your thumb? It contains a transverse mounted zeiss lens with a 3x optical zoom — you can see it moving around in there if you look. It's also got a big screen — 320x240 — and that's in a flip phone. It's a bit of a beast, but on the other hand, since it does absolutely everything, you can forgive it a bit for that.

Starting with the basics. Obviously it's a good phone. It's got external and internal screens. It's a S60 model so it's got all of the good smartphone features and there's tons of software you can load onto it.

It also apparently has WiFi but I didn't have time to try that out. Still, that will be really useful for transferring your pictures and videos because they will be big. That's because it's got a 3 megapixel camera and it shoots DV-quality video.

That's nothing to sneeze at ... just a few years ago I bought a DV camera (Sony) and this phone takes movies that are just as good. The video and audio are crisp. It's easy to operate with thumb buttons on the side for start/stop, and zoom. There's also a separate button to switch from video to camera mode.

For loads of camera snaps examples see Mobile-review .

And here's a video example I shot myself. It's taken indoors, and you know how much trouble crappy videocams always have inside. N93 example video 3.8 MB (it's my friend Paul registering for the expo).

I have a few small gripes. The first is the size ... it will be nice when the nice optics shrink down to tininess. The second is the lack of a Skype VoIP client that can take advantage of the WiFi. But it's hard to blame that on Nokia. No, my real, genuine, justifiable gripe is this. Where's the bloody headphone jack???