Nokia 9300. good, bad, and the ugly?

Question

Anyone have any experience with this and enterprise servers? I'm mostly asking about that data feature. Is it any good?

Answer 1

The deal with Cingular gives Nokia's 9300 line of phones a leg into the U.S. market, where rival Palm Treos and BlackBerry phones from Canada's Research In Motion are in hot demand among business professionals.

It also helps raise the profile of Finland's Nokia in a region where it trails Motorola, the No. 2 maker of mobile handsets worldwide but the leading U.S. supplier.

Nokia's 9300 phone, which was introduced earlier this year and is part of a line that has long been available in Europe, is sleeker and more compact than a bulky predecessor nicknamed "the brick."

The device will include Research In Motion's popular BlackBerry e-mail software in a bid to compete against an upcoming Treo phone that will run Microsoft software. It also will compete against "Q," an ultra-slim device due from Motorola that also uses Microsoft software.

Nokia's 9300 is based on software from Symbian, a European-centered consortium that is controlled by Nokia.

Analysts predict more than 20 million computer-like phones will be sold this year, a tiny fraction of the more than 700 million mobile phones expected to be sold this year.

But this so-called "smartphone" category is expected to grow rapidly to 170 million units a year in about five years.
The Communicator 9300 will be released by Nokia in the first quarter of 2005 with an estimated price of €700 ($847) before subsidies by mobile service providers, Matthews said.

The handset will come in two tri-band versions, optimized for GSM (Global System for Mobile Communications) networks in the European and Asia markets (on 900MHz, 1800MHz and 1900MHz bands), and in the Americas (on 850MHz, 1800MHz and 1900MHz bands). Both versions will be able to roam in GSM networks across regions.

Nokia, which is the world's largest mobile phone maker, has been suffering this year from increased competition from the likes of Motorola Inc., Sony Ericsson Mobile Communications AB and Siemens AG, as well as makers of PDAs that include mobile phone capabilities such Hewlett-Packard Co., PalmOne Inc. and Research In Motion Ltd., the maker of the BlackBerry device.

In the face of declining net sales, the company promised last April to quickly introduce new handsets and to focus on three areas of development: expanding mobile voice, driving consumers' use of multimedia and encouraging more business use of mobile applications.

The 9300 runs on the Nokia Series 80 software platform, which is based on the Symbian Ltd. operating system, and will ship with 80MB of memory, expandable to 2GB with an optional MMC (MultiMediaCard) flash memory card, Nokia said. It supports HTML/XHTML browsing, HTML 4.01 and JavaScript 1.3 and offers a calendar, address book and spreadsheets as well as a PDF viewer.

The handset can also support BlackBerry Connect, though it is not included in the basic sales package, and support for the BlackBerry is patchy among European mobile operators. Nokia has been offering some handsets with the BlackBerry feature in Europe since March, and in the North American region since June.

What the Communicator 9300 will not come with is integrated Wi-Fi or a built-in digital camera. In July, both HP and Motorola introduced mobile devices that function as voice-over-Internet Protocol (VOIP) phones on Wi-Fi wireless LANs and as cellular phones over GSM networks.

"With the Communicator 9300 we focused on the design and on the form factor, and felt that we had to give up something in order to achieve our goals. That's where the Communicator 9500 comes in," Matthews said.

The 9500, which had been announced previously and was described in more detail Wednesday, will come with integrated Wi-Fi and a camera, but will weigh about 220g. That compares with 145g for the Motorola CN620 and 190g for HP's iPAQ h6315. It will be released in Europe and Asia beginning in November and in the Americas in the first quarter of 2005, with a estimated price of €800 ($968) before subsidies by mobile service providers