Nokia 9300i

I got this phone on contract, and had to pay a little bit extra to upgrade to it. I'm glad i did too. Its perfect for business. Stacks of features, and a proper email service, unlike the "email" on other phones. Its my primary business phone and i only use the N70 for personal events. Weekends, evenings, holidays that sort of thing. The main difference between the 9300 and the 9300i is the fact that the i version has added wifi support. ...
...which are popping up everywhere now.

---------Screen---------
I'll start with the screen(s). That's right it has two. The screen on the outside, i dont use much. Even when making calls i tend to open the phone up. Anyway. The outside screen offers all your basic phone menus. That's messaging, settings, profiles, contacts etc etc. Unlike many phones with multiple displays, the displays on these are both colour. 65k colour I believe. ... more

I got this phone on contract, and had to pay a little bit extra to upgrade to it. I'm glad i did too. Its perfect for business. Stacks of features, and a proper email service, unlike the "email" on other phones. Its my primary business phone and i only use the N70 for personal events. Weekends, evenings, holidays that sort of thing. The main difference between the 9300 and the 9300i is the fact that the i version has added wifi support. Meaning you can connect to any of the wifi hotspots which are popping up everywhere now.

---------Screen---------
I'll start with the screen(s). That's right it has two. The screen on the outside, i dont use much. Even when making calls i tend to open the phone up. Anyway. The outside screen offers all your basic phone menus. That's messaging, settings, profiles, contacts etc etc. Unlike many phones with multiple displays, the displays on these are both colour. 65k colour I believe. Which okay, isnt fantastic but it serves its purpose, and in truth you don't need colour on the outside screen really. Its clear to see, and the backlight works well.

When you open the phone up, you unveil the screen on the inside. I don't know what resolution it is, but again i think it is 65K colour, which is a little disapointing considering that other smartphones and PDA have 265k. Having said that, it is widescreen, clear, bright and huge! Its big enough to display a full width web page or pdf document, which is something that can't be said of the N-series smartphones. It displays the "desktop" and menus very well, and unless you add other shortcuts to it, you don't need to scroll at all.

----------Size----------
At first glance, you might be thinking. Woah, what a brick. Which you'd be right. It is a brick. Its not exactly easy to fit in the pocket of your jeans , and even if it does, if it rings it'll take you half an hour, and a pair tow truck to get it out again, because it tends to get wedged in there. Unless of course, you wear jeans with real pockets, which arent so tight they cut the circulation off to your fingers when you try and get something out of them. But anyway, I keep it in my coat pocket. Best place for it. It's got quite some weight to it, so you know if you've got it or not. In short, it is a brick, but it is a highly functional one. PLus, it combines your PDA and your mobile phone, so you won't be needing to carry both of them around.

----------Durability----------
This phone is quite durable, Its barely got a scratch on it, and its fallen off the desk and out of the pocket a few times. The hinge seems strong, even till this day and i've had it a year and a bit now.

----------Operating System----------
This is a series 80 phone, which means it runs on the symbian operating system, Symbian version 7.0 i think, which is one version earlier than that of the N-series phones, which run on Version 8.1. As with any symbian device, it takes a while to boot up, especially when you've needed to take the battery out when it does one of its rare lock ups. Other than that, reliabilty is good from it, and battery life is great, The 9300i has a huge standby time of 230hrs, and amazing talk time of 7-8hours, which i believe the N70 only has a talk time of 3.5hrs.

----------Functions----------
Well, this is where the fun starts. Theres a lot of them, and i no doubt wont remember them all, but i'll give it my best shot. Ofcourse, it has all your normal stuff, a fully functional address book - which i believe you can sync with Act(don't quote me on that though), very useful for those of you using it (obviously). It has a proper email client, unlike that on other smartphones. You can set up your mailbox, dial into your server and recieve all your emails, which is relatively quick, except when you have around 600 messages backdated from a week ago. It has a proper web browser, capable of viewing real web pages full screen. Connectivity is reasonably fast, it runs on 2G rather than the more recent and faster 3G. But its adequet.

It has all the office functions, with version of word and excel. These are pretty useful when you need to quickly type something up. Well i say quickly, yes it has a full qwerty keyboard, but you can't reach your full typing speed on it, given its size. Sure, its faster that a conventional keypad, but you cant expect much. I bought a bluetooth keyboard with it, which to my surprise didnt work. It worked with the N70, but not with the 9300i. I don't know whether it was that particular brand of keyboard that the 9300i doesnt work with, or whether it just plain doesnt work with keyboards.

Okay so connectivity, its got bluetooth, and i believe infrared. Both of which are good, and tend to pick up any bluetooth device within quite a wide range. You can do all the usual pairing with sat navs and car phones. Its got a built in modem, which means you can connect your laptop to it, and recieve internet through it.

Its got all the usual, video playback, polyphonic & real tones, voice dialing aswell, its even got a few games, which have excellent graphics. The pro tour golf especially.

Being symbian, you can install any number of third party software, with pretty much anything you want. Theres hundreds of sites that offer free software and games for the 9300i which people happily share. In theory, you neednt pay for any software you want for this phone.

Of course, the outside keypad can be used for normal texting or making calls if you wished, but its quicker to open it up and use the qwerty in my opinion.

----------Reception----------
The reception is extreamly good. Even in areas where i couldnt get a signal on other phones, i got a signal (albiet a weak signal) on this. In strong signal areas, you will pretty much have full signal.

---------Problems----------
The phone has a few problems, but i mean a few. Some are just inconvienient, so are annoying. One problem, is the occasional crash of the operating system. So you can be sat there thinking, i havent had any calls for a while, look down at the phone and see on the outside that its still on and full functional, go back to your work, look down again and decide to open it up, and you are greated with a white screen and a message saying system error. Which is very misleading. When you turn it back on your greeted with loads of voicemail messages of all the calls you've missed whiles is silently crashed.

Another problem, is the lack of built in vibration. Its not a big deal, but when your phone is on silent, or accidently left on silent and its in your pocket, you're not going to know when you're recieveing a phone call.

It also lacks a camera. Apparently though the 9500 has a camera, but when i asked about tthis i was told that they no longer make that model. i believe this was a lie in order to get me to pay more for this model however, as the 9500 is still on nokias website. So watch out for that if you specifically want a camera.

----------Overview---------
Would i recommend this to others. Yes. Okay so its slightly on the large side, and it lacks a camera and this that and the other. But it does have a lot of features. Even some blackburrys don't have the features that this has. Which has consequently lead me to keep this phone on longer than i intended, because i can't find a match for it. Very reliable, very easy to use. Not cheap, but worth it. 

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