My Nokia 9300 Review

Well I finally was able to get my hands on one of these. My first initial reaction was that it was surprisingly not as big as I had thought. In comparison, its about the same size as the N-Gage when its sideways.

Lets start first with the basics. The Nokia 9300 is a series 80 device running the Symbian 7.0S OS. Fortunately with this phone Nokia didn't do any MMC changing to the regular MMC's will work.
The "cover phone" as its called, or main phone has the series 40 layout which isn't so bad. There are only 5 menu functions with animated display. The 4-way navi key is really cool compared to the joystick and press pad types on the 66xx/36xx. The center button is the menu key and the scroll button is very very easy to maneuver. Another thing that most Nokia users might appreciate is the easy power button. Yeah I know that sounds weird but you wouldn't believe the amount of people, myself included, who had problems just turning the phone on! (thinks back to the 3390 days) One of the things missing is the t9 input, which I guess really isn't a big deal because it has a qwerty keypad.

Now to the PDA:

Powering off the cover phone will still allow the PDA to function once open. Talk about a compact desktop!! Everything you need is right there, well, at your fingertips. The one thing that stuck out was the connectivity functions. On the keyboard there is a chr (character) key. The character key is highlighted in blue and the character key colors correspond. You can activate Bluetooth, Infrared, Sync and Zoom function just by holding the chr key and the corresponding character. Simplicity at its best. Another cool feature are the 8 keypad short-cut . At the top of the keypad you have all of the menus that are located on the screen itself, but just a quicker way of getting there. Desk, Telephone, Web, Contacts, Documents, Calendar and a "My own" key which allows you to attach your favorite program to this key for quick access.. There are also 4 command keys located near the screen display which are used when the option is located near that targeted key.

The screen is amazing. Very crisp images and options to change the backgrounds. Since this is targeted towards professionals there aren't any weird wallpapers. Just nice basic layouts. It also has a standby mode which shuts the screen down when not in use.

The internal 80mb memory was enough for me to install a bunch of apps and documents such as the Settings Wizard (why doesn't NokiaUSA have this?) and Adobe Acrobat Reader and some mp3's. the Office tool comes with everything you need to use for personal productivity. Document, Sheets and Presentation. According to Nokia's specs, the device supports the most common features of Microsoft Word, PowerPoint, and Excel (MS Office 97 or later).

The sound quality is excellent compared to my N-Gage for playing music. The call quality is also clear. The 9300 has a voice recorder which records for as long as the memory can hold, seriously. I turned it on and recorded almost 30 minutes of nothing!! I had walked away from it and forgot about it. Opening up the phone while in a call automatically activates the internal speakerphone, so there are no loudspeaker buttons to push in order to turn it on.

The 9300 is also a pop-port device which I really don't care for. I find it scary that the pins can get dusty. USB connection is also available for the device if that be your choice.

I know the one thing that I left out which is probably what everyone wants to know and that's the EDGE speed. Unfortunately EDGE is not available in my area with Cingular so I wasn't able to test that, but I did notice that GPRS speed was much faster than on my 6600.

Ok, so basically in a nut shell this device is definitely a step up from the normal series 60's that I've played around with. Although targeted towards professionals, I as a college student could definitely see myself using this communicator on a daily basis. Especially the voice recorder as a back-up to note taking. The size isn't a problem for me and the keypad is easy to thumb with.
I didn't want to bog down my post with images so I've listed the photos in my gallery on my In Darla blog My freind
Further specs and information can be found on www.Nokia.com