Think of the Nokia 9290 Communicator as a mobile office. It offers an abundance of features, and it functions as a normal cell phone, albeit larger than what we've come to expect in today's mobile world. The device is about the size of a 1994 era "Brick"' cell phone, at 6.22 inches long, 1.06 inches deep, and 2.20 inches wide, and weighs 8.6 oz. When you consider the features it offers, it becomes clear that the size is more than manageable. The device has 56M bytes of memory, with 16M bytes dedicated to users, 8M bytes to execution, 16M bytes to applications. It also has a 16M-byte memory card. The 32-bit ARM9 RISC processor runs the Symbian operating system with Personal Java, and C++ support. The device's lithium-ion battery provides sufficient talk and usage times. Nokia says the battery life will run up to 10 hours of talk/data/fax time and nine days of PDA usage
With a full-color screen, and a very usable keyboard, accomplishing daily tasks is a breeze. The screen quality and graphics display matches that of much more expensive laptop screens. The hardware is well complemented with a nearly-complete software package. The software includes a web browser, POP e-mail client, Word-style document editor, spreadsheet application, fax application, speakerphone, contact manager, Real Audio/Video application, and computer synching tools.
The browser easily pulled up Google, TechTarget.com, Nascar.com, and other sites. I confirmed travel, looked up directions, pulled up a courthouse schedule in my hometown, and Googled a few of my friends. I sent a late-night e-mail to my boss updating him with my progress on one of our projects, sent a fax to my house, and used the speakerphone feature while driving on the highway.
What surprised me was the quality of the speakerphone. I had better quality using the Nokia speaker phone than I did on my normal cellphone held up to my ear. The quality was clearly better to people on the receiving end of my calls.
This device comes with a few caveats. The biggest is download speed. Even with a perfect signal quality, the device only loads pages at about the speed of a 14.4 bit/sec modem. I am not in a GSM network area, and GSM service may work better. I'm not sure if the download speeds improve with a different service type, but this was my biggest beef.
The device is a bit large, but, again, given the rich feature set, its size is something that can be dealt with. Another complaint was lack of an open SSH-type application. This type of device is ideal for anyone who works in a networked environment. A secure connection to servers and workstations would allow many to do the majority of their work from a boat offshore in the Atlantic. Now that would be cool.
