The furious pace of change in the mobile phone world ensures that even the smartest, most function-rich mobiles are soon superseded by something smarter, thinner and more feature laden. But one mobile phone design that doesn't seem to heed the vagaries of fashion is the family of Nokia Communicators, of which the latest in the line is the E90.

The Nokia Communicator range is now 11 years old, and has had a dozen revamps along the way. But you'd be mistaken to think the E90 is just some old-school design - the E90 is arguably the best-specified smartphone that money can buy.

The original Nokia 9000 Communicator was one of the first phones to successfully meld a mobile phone and a palmtop computer. The concept was simple, from the outside it looked and handled like an oversized cellphone. But open it up like a book and you got a PDA that looked and handled in much the same way as the Psion devices that were so popular at the time.

In the intervening decade, the world has become a completely different place but the attraction of the E90 still remains the same. Unlike so many super-sophisticated smartphones, this is a device that is ever so easy to use as a mobile. In fact, this is something that has vastly improved with the new device.

You can now access every application from the outside of the shell and not just the standard mobile feature set. And you get a high-quality 16-million colour, 320 x 240-pixel screen to do this from. This makes the unit a much more integrated device - and one that is a lot easier to use than before.

Symbian S60

The change in ergonomics has been made possible by yet another change in operating platform for the device - this time, the E90 is using the immensely popular Symbian S60 system.

It's not a move that everyone will be happy with. It means a new suite of software, for instance. But its advantages far outweigh its disadvantages. The S60 platform means that there is a huge catalogue of software that can be made to work on the new E90. More importantly it is an operating system that has already been proved capable of working with all the latest mobile phone features. The result is that the E90 is not just a Communicator for today - it is a Communicator without compromise.

When the 9500, the previous model in the Communicator dynasty, was launched three years ago, it was already out of date. It was the first in the range to offer GPRS and Wi-Fi, but it its Series 80 operating system could not offer the 3G connectivity that many users wanted, and its VGA camera was not up to the quality expected.

The E90 has no such specification issues. It has a 3-megapixel autofocus camera, and a camcorder facility that can compete with the best thanks to 25-frame-per-second VGA capture. It becomes the first 3G-enabled Communicator, but is also one of the best connected devices that you will find with miniUSB socket, Bluetooth 2.0, and infrared.

The icing on the cake, however, is the built in GPS aerial which when used with Nokia's free Maps service means that you need never get lost. Pay for the full over-the-air navigation service, and it means that the E90 could also make your TomTom redundant. Now that's what we call convergence.