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Nokia 9300: a first look

Bonnie Cha & Charles McLellan CNET

Published: 09 Sep 2004

Nokia is giving business users something to write home about with its new 9300 smartphone -- literally. The 9300 flips open to reveal a spacious QWERTY keyboard and an ample internal colour display for on-the-go note-taking and messaging. As a business-orientated phone, it has support for multiple email accounts and Bluetooth, and it runs Symbian OS 7. The 9300 will be available in the first quarter of 2005 in two tri-band versions: one for Europe and Asia (GSM 900/1800/1900) and one for the Americas (GSM 850/1800/1900).

Nokia 9300: due in the first quarter of 2005.

Aimed primarily at corporate citizens, the Nokia 9300's features won't disappoint, with its built-in office applications for documents, spreadsheets and presentations, as well as a PDF viewer. The handset also has a whopping 80MB of free user memory (compared to the Sony Ericsson P910's 64MB and the Treo 600's 32MB), so you'll have plenty of room to store contacts, appointments and more. If that's still not enough, there's an MMC slot for expanding memory up to 2GB.

Other features include an integrated speakerphone, five-way conference calling, an MP3 and multimedia player, an infrared port, a Web browser and USB connectivity. For frequent messengers, there's email support (IMAP4, POP3, SMTP, SyncML and BlackBerry Connect) plus text, instant and multimedia messaging.

With so many goodies packed inside the Nokia 9300, it's no surprise the handset is a little on the bulky side. At 13.2cm by 5.1cm by 2.0cm and 167g, this lengthy mobile will need some room, whether it rides shotgun on your hip or stashed in your bag. Also, for such a full-featured phone, the 9300 has external and internal displays that are limited to 65,536 colours, although newer models support 262,144 shades. And snappers are out of luck with the camera-free 9300 (but see the 9500 Communicator below).

Available in the first quarter of 2005 (pricing and carrier have not yet been determined), the Nokia 9300 will face tough competition from other business-focussed smartphones such as Sony Ericsson's P910, which has a sharper display and an integrated camera.

Coming soon: Nokia 9500 Communicator

Nokia's 9500 Communicator was announced back in February, but is finally due to ship in the fourth quarter of this year. It's very similar in specification to the 9300 previewed above, but adds Wi-Fi (802.11b) wireless networking and a VGA-resolution digital camera. As a result, the 9500 Communicator is slightly larger and heavier than the 9300, measuring 14.8cm by 5.7cm by 2.4cm and weighing 222g.