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.

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.