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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When opened up, the communicator is a beautiful thing. Its large display has everything you'd want: crisp, ultra-high resolution 640x200 65k colors and those are put to good use too. High res icons, sharp text, and pleasing colour schemes. Just the look of the Adobe Reader splash screen is enough to make you go wow! It's an amazing screen to look at, but not in bright sunlight. We've read about how brilliant the display was in sunlight to some other review sites, but it certainly wasn't very readable in our experience. We had to strain our eyes on our way to have lunch.

One of the first reactions to the screen was of touch: does it have a touch-sensitive screen? A stylus? Nope, neither. You gotta use the keyboard and the soft keys. It's actually a thumbboard, but for simplicity's sake we'll call it a keyboard. It's a full QWERTY keyboard with Enter, Backspace, two Shift keys, Tab, Caps lock, even Ctrl and Menu and a special Character key. It has a full numeric row, an arrow triangle, but no numeric keypad. And my favorite Esc key! It also has seven preset shortcut keys that take you to Desk, Telephone, Messaging, Web, Contacts, Documents and Calender, and another key called "My own" that's user configurable. The keyboard is very comfortable to use. The keys have a very fine tactile feedback which enables fast typing. Some of the commonly used symbols like the full stop (.), @, and quote (") are not in the relative places on our regular PC keyboards. Again one of those things that you can get used to, but the fact that I was using a QWERTY keyboard kept pulling me back to the default location of the keys and slowed me down. Another possible problem is the lack of backlight on the keyboard. Though there's sufficient light falling from the screen above, a comfortably obtuse angle for the screen will not throw down enough light to illuminate the whole keyboard. There are also four soft keys to the right side of the display, the labels to which appear on the dedicated screen area. There's also a joystick which I'd rather call a "joystub" since it looks and feels like someone just snipped the joystick off the keyboard. It was still quite comfortable to use, but sometimes it was a little too sensitive, especially while scrolling. The joystub offers five-way navigation.

The 9300 comes with a fair set of applications preinstalled. The Office section has a word processor, spreadsheet, and a presentation creator/viewer. In addition to the apps available on the outside phone (telephone, contacts and messaging), there's also a calendar that makes full use of the wide screen. The Media section includes the web browser, an image viewer, a voice recorder, and a music player that does MP3s and AACs in, yep, full stereo. There's also RealPlayer for video. No, there's no FM here. If you want FM, go get the 7710! As mentioned before, it also has Adobe Reader for viewing PDF files. The MMC card in the phone came with Pro Tour Golf and MobiReader for reading books. Speaking of the MMC, the phone has around 80MB of memory on the device and an MMC slot for additional cards. The 9300 ships with a 128mb card. Files can be transferred to the phone via Bluetooth, Infrared, or USB cable that's provided in the box.