Toys

Packaging and included accessories

The Nokia 9500 Communicator comes packaged in an unimpressive box. Inside this box, one finds a manual, the battery, a charger, a docking station, a CD-ROM, a headset (wired, one earplug) and the phone itself. First impression: What a brick is this!

First impressions: The outside

It's heavy. It's big. And it's not beautiful.

Choosing the Nokia 9500 Communicator on the merits of looks or style can definitely be ruled out. So this device needs to convince potential buyers with its features alone. But before we get to the technical details, let me describe the outward appearance a little more: The phone seems robust (of course this does not mean dropping it is recommended) and, notwithstanding its size and weight, is easily used with a single hand. The keys on the outside, however, feel cheap and imprecise. On the upside, they are larger than the keys usually are on today's cell phones, so handling is a little easier altogether. The outside display looks cheap and quite dark, rather unimpressive. There's also a cursor key under it to navigate through menus which is, again, annyoingly imprecise: Activating the key lock becomes rather a tedious task, because one has to press the center of the joystick button and, in quick succession, the "*" key. Exactly pressing the joystick button's center, however, takes more than a little practice.

Inserting and removing the battery also is not as simple as one would expect. First of all, the cover above the battery compartment is hard to remove, especially if one has never done this before. Then, having successfully mastered this, the battery itself fits tightly in the compartment, thus making removing it from there a pain. Unfortunately, this has to be done from time to time, because removing the battery is the only way to reset the device if it crashed.

The telephone interface

Using the Nokia 9500 Communicator as a simple cell phone alone, that is, without opening the it, does not do it any justice, but is of course entirely possible. The major drawback here is having to deal with the aforementioned keys on its outside cover. Navigating through the menus with the cursor key would be straightforward if one wouldn't accidentally click the wrong direction all the time. Apart from that the outside telephone interface is okay, but nothing spectacular.

The phone's outside also sports a camera. I can only regret this, because I'm sure a business cell phone like the Nokia 9500 Communicator does simply not need a camera. Cameras on cell phones are toys, nothing more, and certainly not toys of the kind the 9500's target group is interested in. Additionally, they can even be a pain, because cell phone cameras may interfere with a company's security restrictions.

The communicator interface

Opening the phone reveals the 9500's communicator interface, featuring a wide TFT screen and a small keyboard. The screen is impressive: The picture quality is excellent and it is bright enough to be used outside, though of course not in direct sunlight. The keyboard is small, but that is to be expected. After a little training it is, however, entirely usable to type messages or short notes.

The graphical user interface looks clean, simple and elegant. After a short time of getting used to it, one can effectively use it. Responses to actions may be a little sluggish, from time to time, though.

Stability is not quite up to standards. One does encounter crashes of applications (which tend to make the whole system unstable) or complete freezes of the device. Like I mentioned above already, the only way to wake up the phone from this state is to remove the battery, wait a few seconds and reinsert the battery. A painful process.

Connectivity

The Nokia 9500 Communicator is, first and foremost, a cell phone. Placing and receiving phone calls works easily and effectively. Sound quality is okay. It also features a speaker on its top, so placing it on a desk before oneself and using it handsfree is possible.

More noteworthy than the plain telephone features, however, are the things you can do via the communicator interface: Being Symbian-OS-based, there are quite a number of applications to pick from, including an ssh client. And together with the device's wireless LAN network interface (11 MBit maximum), one can replace a full fledged notebook in many situations, like for small administrative tasks on a remote server somewhere on the road. If WLAN is not available, the device can also set up a connection via GPRS. Depending on the mobile carrier, this can be a costly alternative. It does, however, work well and fast enough to ssh into a remote machine, edit a config file and restart a service.

The included web browser is based on Opera for Symbian OS and works well, if a bit slow. Unfortunately, the device's screen, large and excellent as it is, still turns out to be too small for most web pages, so one has to do a lot of horizontal scrolling. Of course, the Nokia 9500 Communicator itself cannot be blamed for that, neither can Opera.

Writing, sending and receiving mail is easily done with the bundled mail application. Especially noteworthy here is that it does handle both POP3 and IMAP and can also deal with all kinds of encryption, thus the Nokia 9500 Communicator is the first cell phone I ever had that I could actually use for my e-mail accounts. It is a bit unfortunate that the list view of e-mails in a folder only shows three mails at a time, so one has to do a lot of scrolling up and down.

Of course, the device is also communicating via bluetooth or infrared.

Synchronization

The weakest aspect of the Nokia 9500 Communicator are its synchronization features. The bundled CD-ROM only offers applications for Microsoft Windows. I did install these on my notebook, but still couldn't get the device to sync: The software finds the device via bluetooth and starts syncing, but then hangs and does not do anything for quite a while. Eventually, the software tells me it lost connection with the cell phone. Disappointing. I'm rather sure this can be fixed, but since syncing under Windows would be rather pointless anyway, I didn't yet bother to investigate the matter more closely.

Synchronizing with Mac OS X also is a no go: Apple's iSync is not able to talk to SyncML-enabled cell phones, and the Nokia 9500 Communicator is one of those (Sony Ericssons P900 being another popular one, I am told). There appears to be no third-party solution for syncing with the Mac, either.

There's also no solution yet for Linux to sync with the device. Although there are reports of people successfully synchronizing P900s with Kontact, these solutions depend on code from some CVS and recompiling kdepim. A little too much to ask, I think. At least I can talk to the cell phone using KDE's bluetooth IO-slave and OBEX, so transferring files is possible. I dumped all my contacts from the KDE addressbook into a vcard-file, moved it over to the 9500 and imported the contacts there, using a shareware application called SmartVCard that is free to use for a couple of days to try it out. This has worked reasonably well, although all cell phone numbers are, unfortunately, marked as being of the fixed network type.

Random notes

There's a version of Adobe Acrobat for Symbian. All this has done so far is crash whenever I opened a PDF.
The phone also has a calendar application, but I consider this useless without being able to sync with either Linux or Mac OS X.
Additionally, there are a word-processor, a spread sheet and -- believe it or not -- a presentation program. I haven't had a look at those yet, because I cannot imagine having any use for one of them.
The phone has a wide range of ringtones included (some of them are even usable), but does not feature vibration alert. This is a rather strange omission for a phone this expensive.

Summary

All in all, the Nokia 9500 Communicator is a decent cell phone and a very useful PDA rolled into one, a PDA, however, that pretty much likes to keep to himself. The lack of synchronization features with Linux or Mac OS X are a major drawback. However, with its wireless LAN interface, the great screen, the small but perfectly usable keyboard and, last but not least, the (third party) ssh client, its the perfect match for IT businessmen, at least if one does not mind the size. Or the price.

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