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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.
The actual URL is http://www.nokiausa.com/communicator/features/1,49 83,,00.html. I hope.
Symbian rocks.
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your talking into your car stereos removable face. Other than that it looks pretty sweet.
-Tolerate my intolerance
a coworker just got a treo and i played with it for a while, and can't say that i like it at all.
contrary to what i've read here many times, you can talk on the phone using and ear piece and go through your schedule at the same time, and yes that could be useful. but combining them takes away from both products and the only advantage is carrying around 1 less gadget.
all you end up with is a tiny PDA and a huge cell phone.
i remember seeing a tiny concept pda a while ago with flip out screens that merge to make 1 big screen... if they could do that and keep the size to a standard (small) cell phone, that might be useful, but until then, a visor prism + cell serves my need much better.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
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?
Yes, it does (Google is your friend :-)
F-Secure's version exists and there's also
(not so suprisingly SSH's version.
Ville
I've used the 9000 for a few years. It was a great remote terminal (telnet/ssh) for a lot of sysadmin tasks; it saved me more than once while working at various startups around the south SF bay area. When the 8890 came out, I took to carrying that instead due to it's immensely small size and good IrDA-modem capabilities (just set it beside the laptop and rock on)... as I finally had a tiny Sony VAIO laptop I could keep with me.
.WAV (or with extra software, .MP3) files for ringtones, coupled with the possibility of assigning a ring-tone to every contact entry in the phone, memory permitting. Having one's phone ring like a Daft Punk song or a friend's call announced by a good Pulp Fiction quote is just _way_ too much fun.
The VAIO is long gone, replaced by a meaty Dell 8200. The 9290 finally made it here after 8 months of waiting. The battery life is 8-10x that of the 9000 communicator, the screen is actually useable, the MMC additional memory comes in very handy, and the keyboard is no worse than before. It's a lot faster than the 9000 too.
Things Palmies will hate:
1. No touchscreen
2. Thumboarding-only
3. Most of the good software is from the UK market, and overall there's a lot less of it
It drives my ex-roomie (the Visor freak) nuts, but my friends who are WinCE users took to it pretty quickly. We're playing with the SDK now, trying to get some of our more favored clients to work on the device.
#1 "Geek Factor" the phone has: The ability to play
NOTE: For you California types, poor ol' behind-the-times Cingular has no clue this phone exists, and if you tell them you're using it on their network they tend to freak at you. It takes some serious arguing to get the SIM set up right (for 3 numbers, data/fax/voice) but they will eventually do it... and none of their tech group knows how to configure the WAP browser to work with their network. Their half-assed "my wireless web" product just doesn't cope well. Within a month or two they will hopefully come up to speed on it. I had the advantage of having gone through the 3-number setup for the older 9000, so I got off pretty easy. Once configured properly, it'll forward data calls to an attached laptop or receive faxes in the background, no user intervention required.
For those who asked earlier... yes, you can flip it open and keep working while you talk. You have your choice of speakerphone or ear-piece (depending on how public you want your convo to be). While the phone will intially default to a display showing the calling parties (up to 5 can be in a conference call at once, depending on your network), you can swap to whatever app you wish, for taking notes or reading from a spreadsheet, etc. The 'sound recorder' app will also operate during a call, and will capture both sides of the phone conversation very nicely.
It's not the 'uber PDA'. It's pretty big for a phone. As a combo-device, however, it does very well. The apps integrate with the GSM functions nicely. All my basic PDA needs are met: note taking, contact management, SMS management, faxing, email and simple web browsing. All the phone needs are there too, with the same features as most any Nokia phone, with nice GUI add-ons if you desire... with a battery lifespan that'll compete with any modern phone. These basic needs are quite well met by a device that still fits on the hip and only has to be charged at the end of the work-week, letting me leave the bulky laptop on the desk most of the time. If I really need to do more, I'll be sure to pack up the laptop and bring it along -- and even then, I can use the 9290 as a GSM-modem.