Nokia 9300 Smartphone

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Nokia 9300 Smartphone

Aalaap Ghag, May 05, 2005 1010 hrs IST

Let's take a break from the frilly teenybopper phones for a while

Compact, great display size, good set of applications, full QWERTY keypad that's very comfortable

Keyboard has no backlight, outer phone has very limited features (no T9), inner display doesn't work too well in bright sunlight, passable battery life.

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Enough of those frilly cellphones with radio and camera and all those things aimed at college kids, let's grow up and talk business with Nokia's Communicator series. But this is a smartphone review isn't it? Well, I honestly don't know why they called a new 9000-series phone a smartphone rather than the traditional Communicator. The 9300 is as much a communicator than any other before it, and probably a whole lot smarter than a regular smartphone, so why? I guess there's a reason why I'm not in the Marketing department.

The 9300 is, in simplest words, a "lighter" version of the 9500 Communicator. Literally, the device weighs a modest 167g, compared to the 9500's 230g. The 9300 is 13.5cm high, 5.1cm wide, and 2.1cm thick, which is not at all worthy of the "compass box" title. Its not as sleek as your 6610, but for what it is, its definitely not huge. In contrast, the 9500 is a pretty big 14.8cm high, 5.7cm wide, and 2.7mm thick. Features wise, the 9500 comes with a camera, WiFi 802.11b and is much, much bigger in size than the 9300. There's no camera or WiFi in this 9300.

The phone has a similar form factor - a Series 40 phone with the flip closed, and a Series 80 interface communicator with the flip open. Let's take a look at the outside "phone" first.

The phone is a tri-band GSM/GRPS (900/1800/1900) handset. The display is a 128x128 displaying up to 65k colors, but I feel that's entirely wasted. The outer Series 40 phone is so limited in functionality; it doesn't even have a picture viewer or high-color menu icons. The only place where the color would be used is the background wallpaper. But come on! The phone offers only messaging, call log, contacts, profiles, and settings applications. While the call log and contacts applications are fairly featured, messaging will be a problem because there is no T9. Eh? That's right, you have to open the phone and type your message out on the full QWERTY keypad, or its multi-tap all the way for you. Even the profiles application lets you choose a profile to activate, but you can't edit any of them, so if you want to change the volume level of your default General profile, you will have to open the thing up and do it from inside. I know it doesn't sound like a lot, after all you wouldn't spend 32k on a communicator just to use it like a phone, but if you've got a laptop carry bag in one hand and the phone in another? Then, this Series 40 UI is the slowest I've ever used. And here I was, comparing other phones to the speed of Series 40, which had become a benchmark of fast.