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Reviews: Nokia 9210 First Impressions |
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In this article Russ Spooner outlines his first impressions of
the Nokia 9210. Thanks go out to him for this piece. Apologies that
this article isn't broken up an illustrated, but I am away from
my home computer and don't have access to all editing feastures!
Initial views
It has been a week and a half since I convinced the mrs that I
really, really needed a 9210 and that 500 quid was a small price
to pay for my happiness... (She gets two or three of these speeches
a week...).
After some ringing around I managed to locate on in a local phone
shop and rushed out and shelled out some cash.
The first thing that struck me about the unit is that it is a lot
lighter than it looks. It uses the popular anodised aliminum look,
without relying on aluminum, and uses the blue LED backlight for
the front phone window.
The general feel of the unit is one of quality. You get the sensation
of having something expansive in your hands...
With the unit you get a charger, serial cable, huuuge manual and
CD. It also comes with a 16mb MMC card pre-installed and loaded
with additional applications such as the Fax Modem software and
a video player!
In the UK you get the digital camera with it! Which made me quite
happy!
Having let the unit charge for about 20 seconds I started playing
with it.
The set-up of the unit was straight forward with a wizard guiding
me through inputting name, address, location and so on. T found
the keyboard to be a tad fiddly to begin with and appreciated the
audio signal that a key had been pressed.
The most amazing thing that stuck in my mind was the amazing clarity
of the colour screen. It is crystal (no pun) sharp and the colour
rendition is brilliant. Astonishing, really. Far superior to the
PocketPC devices I own. Having sone an initial setup, I moved on
to configuring my internet conection. This was guite painless: if
you have ever configured a desktop PC or a pocket device for internet
access you will find this a simple task, and I was pleased to see
it work first time!
I fired up the web-browser and checked out my site.... Gorgeous.
Everything rendered like a charm!
Very impressive... Slow as hell, of course, 9600 is painful, but
not being on Orange means that it as good as it gets.
The phone itself (as in the talky-speaky bit) to begin with confused
me because you talk into the "back" of the phone. I.e.
the opposite side of phone you would expect... This still catches
me out occasionally... But if you open the clamshell you will be
amazed by the quality (and volume) of the speakerphone! The build
in speaker is astonishingly loud!
After playing with the phone function, the next trick was to get
the PC connectivity up and running.
My desktop PC actually has 10 serial ports (using a blueheat PCI
card) this apparently was far too confusing for the software and
to this day when I try and connect to the Communicator to the desktop
the connectivity software crashes!
Fortunately I have a decent laptop so once I had installed the
software on it I was able to connect to it with few problems.
Synchronising the device to outlook to update the contacts and
calendar entries is painful... and confusing. I am not going to
walk you through it here, I might save it for another story. Suffice
it to say that it is unintuitive. I found myself wishing that psion
had licensed activesync.
Copying files to and from the device is simple, however there is
no way to do this without having the file converted to the Symbian
formats.... I found this a little frustrating. Perhaps I want to
look at a plain text file in the web-browser, instead of it being
converted to Word format. i can see thiws is going to cause problems
for some users.
Day to day usage of the device is fun... It has it quirks: I am
certain there are memory leaks in a couple of the applications that
come with it.... I have found myself having to reboot every couple
of days. If I don't I find some of the applications start behaving
strangely, or dialog boxes dont close the way they should.
I have found a couple of other things that are a tad irritating:
You can set a wav file to play as your ring tone and it works fine...
However if you do the same for SMS alerts you will find that the
wav file you selected will not play! Very strange... A bug I am
sure that will be fixed in future versions.
I found that the 16MB MMC card that comes with the 9210 quickly
gets filled, and so I went out and bought a 32 meg card... Much
better! I now have enough room for all the random apps I install
as well as a full episode of Family Guy that I can watch with the
Video Player!
The old 16MMC card went to good use in the camera that came with
the 9210. Not a bad camera... however not exactly the dogs b*llocks.
It only has a couple of menu settings:
Autoflash on/off
Take picture
Delete Picture(s)
Transfer Picture(s)
The autoflash feature is nice, but you can't force it on... only
off...
The picture quality is as you would expect from a 640x480 rez camera:
perfect for web pages and casual memories :)
The biggest issue I had with it was that there is no real documentation
with the camera... So you don't know what the meaning of the LEDs
are...
Oh, that and the fact that you have no real idea as to how much
memory is left and thus how many empty slots for photos.... You
just get this Empty -> Full fuel gauge thing...
I ended up playing with it for quite a while before I developed
a technique for taking photos that weren't smudged by me moving
the camera too soon after pressing the button.
The build quality is high and it fits nicely into the palm of your
hand. Feels pretty solid. As does the shutter (on/off) mechanism.
Not only does this camera work extremely painlessly with the software
supplid with the 9210 it works perfectly with the IR image transfer
software that comes with windows 2000.
One can only assume that the 9210 software is also compatible with
other IR cameras, but I don't have any...
Anyway, back to the 9210 itself:
The strange thing about the 9210 is that I thought it would be
a pain lugging around what, to all intents and purposes is an early
90's size lump of a phone, until I realised that I could safely
leave whatever PDA I was planning to use that day behind.
Also, strangely, the weight is not all that far off a 7110! Although
I carry it around in a jeans pocket most of the time, I can see
that I might shell out some dough for a holster or case of some
kind in the future...
As I get more and more used to the keyboard the more I like it.
It is squidgy and fiddly, but not unpleasant and while I can't ever
see myself touch typing on it I can see myself blasting out SMSs
much quicker than a T90 enabled phone, and whacking out emails at
my usual rate!
The layout and ergonomics of the whole thing lend itself to a two
handed-type-with-thumbs approach to using it, with all keys and
buttons in easy and comfortable reach.
And with the rocker style arrow keys I can't wait for some decent
games and emulators to appear!
In summary:
Good Points: Light-ish Superb screen Intuitive Operating system
Good ergonomics Excellent speakerphone
Bad points: Should have more ram for running applications It is
tricky to get the aerial out... Its size (if you are bothered by
that sort of thing)
Overall I rate it 10 out of 10 simply because it does everything
I would ever need from a phone/PDA. I love it. So there.
Russ Spooner
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Copyright
(©) Rafe Blandford
2000-2001 | Last modified: September 19 2001.