Nokia 9500 Communicator Review

Nokia 9500 Communicator is the much anticipated replacement for the Nokia 9210i, and it represents a significant collaboration between Nokia and its technology partners to create a class-leading hybrid hand held computer/mobile device for businesses and individuals who need maximum power and flexibility on the move.

It’s worth remembering that the Nokia 9210 Communicator was announced way back in late 2000 and finally shipped in about June 2001. The enhanced 9210i came out in about mid-2002 - by the time the 9500 starts shipping the 9210 platform will have been in production for over three years.

Fans of the Communicator series were beginning to doubt that a new model would ever come along, and the feature set on the 9210i was getting so out of date as to make the “Communicator” tag a joke - the 9210i doesn’t have GPRS, EDGE, Bluetooth, or USB connectivity and the fact that it still sold at all was on the basis of it’s excellent screen and useful keyboard.

By the time the Nokia 9500 actually becomes available, you can expect to see a lot more smart devices competing with it. It appears that Nokia are revealing the 9500 this far out for two reasons - firstly, to act as a spoiler against current product releases from Nokia’s rivals, such as Motorola, and secondly to quash speculation over the future of the Communicator platform.

Technically on Nokia 9500 Review, it has a tri-band GSM phone sold either in a GSM 900/1800/1900 or 850/1800/1900 configuration depending on country. It supports GPRS (up to 53.6kbps) and EDGE (up to 236.8kbps) plus built-in wireless ethernet connectivity over 802.11b giving a maximum throughput of 11Mbps - this makes it the first mobile phone announced to have built in ethernet. Sadly it doesn’t support 3G networks and HSCSD support appears to have been dropped, which is bad news for corporate customers running their own dial-in access to internal networks. The two variants of the phone will lead to confusion, and when Motorola is producing quad band phones as a matter of routine, then Nokia look weak in this respect.

Nokia 9500 Review Communicator Specification:
Network:Tri-band GSM
Data:GPRS/EDGE/Wireless Ethernet
Screen:640×200 pixels + 128×128 pixels, 64k colours
Camera:640×480 pixels
Size:Large, PDA-style device, 148×57x24mm / 222 grams
Bluetooth:Yes
Infra-red:Yes
Polyphonic:Yes
Java:Limited
Battery life:4-6 hours talk / 7-12 days standby
OS:Symbian Series 80

The 9500 is the first Communicator to feature a digital camera, capable of taking both stills and video clips. Although at first glance a camera looks like a good idea, it means that the phone represents a potential security risk for certain types of business - and considering that by Q4 2004 that most new phones will be shipping with much better cameras with more that four times the resolution, then the camera is frankly not much of an enhancement and perhaps it could have been left as an add-on.

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