Nokia 9300i Communicator review
Nokia 9300i Communicator review
Nokia 9300i is a hard one to approach. The Nokia Communicator range has always been evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and there has been very little practical change between models. And let’s not kid ourselves here, Nokia may label the 9300 (and 9300i) a smartphone and not a communicator, but it’s squarely in the clamshell European PDA design, and has been since it launched in the mid nineties. Each model has improved what needed to be improved, but the device has never been about pushing the boundaries of the technology. If there’s a cutting edge to technology then the Communicators have always been a step behind the sharp bit – doing a perfectly good job without risking anything.
How long does it take to squeeze the innards of the Nokia 9500 Communicator into a package the size of the Nokia 9300 Communicator? A full year, apparently, with the fruits of Nokia’s labour finally hitting shelves as the 9300i.
Maybe we’re a bit spoiled with our Treos and our HTCs, but when All About Symbian concludes that despite lacking a number of popular features Nokia’s upcoming 9300i clamshell smartphone is a good device for business users on the go, it automatically gets knocked off of our short list.
This is a phone you will come to rely on. It’s not flashy out the box, it’s not hugely attractive to the shiny first adopters. If you’ve heard of the 80/20 rule in product design, then the 9300i follows that perfectly. 80% of users are going to use only 20% of the features. It can be applied in many ways. In other words, this is a mass-market phone, for regular users.
The difference between the 9300i and the 9300 is, superficially, just one… the addition of Wi-Fi. While the opportunity was there for 3G connectivity, major upgrades to the firmware and applications or additional pre-installed applications, Nokia haven’t gone down that route. With the phone still geared towards business users, the call for Wi-Fi was irresistible – it looks like everything else will have to wait.
The 9300i is exactly the same as the 9300 in every way save for the addition of WiFi, which turns out to be a mixed blessing because the pokey 150MHz processor can’t render pages as fast as the 802.11 can pull them down. Like its sibling, the 9300i lacks 3G data capabilities, a camera (which makes sense for the targeted audience), and a usable joystick/rocker, although it gets high marks for the rest of the keyboard ergonomics, the sharp LCD (albeit with an odd 640 x 200 resolution), and implementation of Symbian Series 80.
Seemingly separated at birth, the physical differences between the 9300i and its predecessor are minimal with identical physical measurements of 132 x 51 x 21 mm and a 5 g weight gain up to 172g. Sporting an arguably more attractive colour scheme, the outside offers up a large and comfortable numeric keypad right beneath an itsy bitsy display running the Series 40 operating system at 128 x 128 pixels and 65K colours. Tactile feedback is excellent, and fortunately audible feedback isn’t loud enough to negate a bit of discrete in-meeting tapping.
Void of an integrated camera, the only other external tidbits worth mentioning include a dedicated speakerphone loudspeaker atop the device, and as with its predecessor the 9300i remains held face inward when talking, as opposed to their common ancestors. Also, the bottom conceals Nokia’s proprietary Pop-port connector and a charging jack.
This device also does all of the usual multimedia/office functions you’d expect from a smartphone, and sounds like it does them fairly well, but in the end it seems like it will probably be resigned to serve as a safe choice for Finnish corporate IT buyers.