Nokia 9290 Finally Available in the US

AmyZ writes "The new Nokia 9290 Communicator has finally become available for US residents. Europe has had the 9210 for over a year now. Its a GSM based phone and well as a PDA that uses Symbian as its OS." I still don't quite feel that the PDA/Cellphone combo has come of age, but its nice to see another entry. That machine does looks to be sufficient for basic web tasks.

Comments

Or here, even

[FFFish]

The actual URL is http://www.nokiausa.com/communicator/features/1,49 83,,00.html. I hope.

Symbian rocks.

Re:Or here, even

[MaxVlast]

The New York Times really panned the thing. They said it was slow and ungainly.

I'll stick with my Samsung I300. Fast, Palm OS, my current cell service. Good machine, altogether.

Better Address

[sehryan]

http://www.nokiausa.com/communicator/features/1,49 83,,00.html

Here is a link to the phone that works.

nokia detects slashdotting?

[Jucius Maximus]

Nokia USA.com

The page you requested has moved. Click one of the links below to go to the new NokiaUSA Web site.

Go here: http://www.nokiausa.com/communicator/features/1,49 83,|SRC-P,00.html - if it doesn't work they are detecting via javascript that you came from slashdot or something.

Try this URL

[soybean]

http://www.nokiausa.com/communicator/

Re:One thing I just don't get....

[Lemmy Caution]

Speaker. The Nokia has a speaker.

excellent

[tps12]

The Nokia 9290 combines crystal clear sound with text and voice messaging, "browsing," and the best technical support this side of the Atlantic.

My company recently switched from the old Motorola 362z to the 9290 for all of our inter-office and transcontinental communication, and the results have so far been superlative. These babies integrate seamlessly with Windows, Mac, and even Linux productivity apps, and transition costs were minimal.

Another strong point of these phones is data management. In that sense they function as PDAs. In our business we must gather and keep track of thousands of valid email addresses, and the 9290 offers best-of-breed features that make my life a breeze.

Another home run, Nokia...keep up the great work!

Get your software here

[Subcarrier]

Here's a great site for finding software for your 9210 or 9290:

http://www.my-communicator.com/

Try playing DOOM or boot Linux/Elks on the IBM XT emulator. Cool stuff!

Mmmm... Tarantella support

[Anonymous Coward]

I know there is a Tarantella client for the 9210. I assume it will work on the 9290. Anyone know for sure?

Of course!

[Subcarrier]

Just install the NFS server on it and mount the Communicator on your Linux machine:

NFS server for Nokia 9210/9290

I beta tested two a few months ago

[scubacuda]

My employer gave me two for testing earlier this year. (We're an integrator; Nokia was talking to us about selling them, and we were talking to other companies [such as IBM] about developing/selling applications for our end users.)

As phones, they rock. The best feature (by far) is the speakerphone. I could set it on my monitor, lean back in my chair, and talk to customers without them ever knowing that I was using a speaker phone (when I called my mom, she said it sounded no worse than a regular cell phone call). Setting it up with Outlook contacts is a cinch (I didn't try synching it with any other contact management prorams). The nice wide screen is nice for HTTP: browing (compared to, say, the iPaq, where you have to scroll over to the right to see the rest of the page). I had several movie clips (Spider-man, Episode II, Jurassic Park, etc.) that I would use to show customers just how awesome that little screen was...

As organizers, however, they SUCK ASS. There is NO stylus, and you can't touch the screen like you can on a Palm. You change one contact's info, and it takes fucking forever to replicate those new changes over (an eternity compared to Palm's Hotsynch). While a few features are cool (they've got programs in there open up Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents), overall it is very unimpressive compared to the many other PDAs out there (Palm, iPaq, etc.).

I'm not sure why the transfer rate is so bad. It takes an eternity to backup over a serial cable (the prototype NFS unit I had, at least, didn't come with any sort of firewire, USB, etc. cable). When you back it up for the first time (everything on the little hard drive to your desktop), you might as well do something else for the next several hours.

I had all sorts of weird bugs on my prototype. The first software version that they gave us was very buggy (I couldn't even synch it with Outlook). Finally I got in touch with a Nokia engineer who FedExed me a copy of their latest one. While that fixed my Outlook problems, I still had all sorts of weird synching problems under Windows 98 and 2000. (For example, my computer would all of a sudden stop seeing my Communicator. I would have to reboot just to see the Communicator again.) This was like 3 months ago, so hopefully they fixed all that in their latest release.

All in all, I've spent hundreds of hours testing them. (Setting them up for sales reps to show customers, recording bugs, installing all sorts of programs [yes, even DOOM!], racking up 5000 minutes on my long commutes each month...etc.). All this testing, and I still can't say that I'd recommend this for the average PDA user. (There are, however, certain niche markets that could definitely benefits from this sorta gadget.)

The sales manager in our company wanted me to set it up so that sales reps could access a 5000 record ACT! database on a Citrix server via these communicators. Because of other more important projects, I put that on the back burner. Has anyone else done anything similar with them?

Re:I beta tested two a few months ago

[evilviper]

Your experience was obviously biased for whatever reason.

I can't stress enough that it's soooo much more than a cell phone with a web browser!
Symbian's office applications are absolutely tops in the handheld world.

Several font styles, same range of font sizes you get on a desktop, Bold, Italicise, Underline, subscript, superscript, Align left/right/center/justify. Password protection, print preview, templates, zoom, wrap, outline... Seting indents, tab breaks, line spacing, borders, bullet-styles. And the ability to insert objects into documents. You can easilly insert a drawing (image), spreadsheet cells, or a graph, into a text document. And that doesn,t bring up the fact that it starts up incredbly quickly, and is incredibly more stable than anything I've used on a desktop computer.

That's only the Word Processor! It's got an Agenda program that is the best I've ever seen and gets rave reviws from every review I've read. And this doesn't cover the non-bundled software like a subnet calc., fully-feature RPN calculator, telnet/SSH, PGP, PDF viewer (based on XPDF), mp3 player, all free. The slightly less free, full featured, Opera web browser is available for it.

I'm done ranting. It's full-featured, it's got all the features you could want if you actually do work on your handheld, and many fun things in case you don't. It makes Palms look like glorified wrist watches, and WinCE devices look... horrible. There's software available for natively syncing it to a Linux machine, and a FTP/NFS/self-contained Backup software if you want to sync over the internet, infrared to another device, etc.

Text Messaging

[iCharles]

I presently pay about $5/month for text messaging, and I can send up to 500/month free ($0.10/each thereafter). It can go phone-to-phone, as well as e-mail-to-phone (and phone-to-email).

Other than receiving headlines e-mailed to me, I honestly don't use it everyday. However, it has helped me on a few occasions:

• We were on vacation, and were supposed to meet someone in Chicago. We wanted to find out something about our meeting, but wasn't sure what number she would be at, but knew she was checking a HotMail-type account. So, we e-mailed her, and got our answer.
• My team has pagers with alpha capaiblity (yes, the phone could fill in, but there are other requirements for the pager). I frequently send a text-page from my phone this way, regardless of where I might be.
• When I'm out of town on business, my wife and I exchanged a series of e-mails. Nice to be in touch on the road randomly.

I admit that I probably could cancel it and only occasionally notice, however, it is providing enough value to be worth it to me.

My provider has indicated that they are likely to provide chatting with AOL IM users. Bridging the phone-to-IM gap will be nice.

I have seen this phone

[bowb69]

and compared to other cell phones it simply outdoes them. The company that I worked for some time ago was asked to redo the pim applications for the phone and it was going to run (you guessed it) linux. I probably can't say much about it because of NDA's but all in all the development group was wondering when this phone would hit the US market. For what you got it didn't seem all that bulky and had a ton of features.

Forget business uses, it runs DOOM in color!

[villoks]

The number one killer aplication, why the Communicator is a must buy:

A totally working version of DOOM in your mobile phone and even in color!

(actually there's even two versions, Hannu Viitala's CDoom (open source) and a commercial version by Wildpalm)

It has also other great games like Terra Force

But wait, this is not all :-) Communicator can also run games from ZX Spectrum (freeware)! If this is not the ultimate gaming phone, I don't know what is.

I'm still waiting for the first games, which support multiplayer-modes. Unfortunately this may require the GPRS version of Comminicator, which hopefully is out quite soon..

Ville

ps. I'm no way connected to Nokia or Wildpalm..