The much-anticipated follow-up to Nokia's 9200 Communicator series has been announced; Jørgen Sundgot shares his first impressions on the Nokia 9500 from the beach in Cannes.
Following some two years of launch rumours and subsequent disappointments, Nokia has finally announced that the world's best-selling WAN handheld is going to get a successor. Retaining the same clamshell form factor, but offering a number of much needed - and overdue - upgrades on the hardware side, the Nokia 9500 Communicator is very likely to yet again propel Nokia into a leading position in this market.
Having received a visual makeover, the 9500 is, although still a bit on the large side, quite a bit more stylish than its predecessor with a colour scheme in silver grey and black and less squarish design. Being a clamshell, it opens to reveal an excellent, 16-bit colour display capable of showing up to 65,536 colours, which is very crisp and more than sufficiently bright. As a side note, the external display is almost as good - and it now runs the updated Series 40 interface.
Despite the qualities of the internal display, it is still not touch sensitive, however, so the 9500 comes complete with a miniature version of a full QWERTY keyboard and the same navigational setup as for the 9200 series. Sadly, its tactile feedback and travel is as bad - or possibly even worse - than that of the Nokia 9200, although the keys have been enlarged and placed back-to-back making them easier to locate. This is a major disappointment, as the keyboard isn't really suited for use as a thumbboard, and negates any type of speedy text input such as touch typing.
 | Nokia 9500 (Photo: Jørgen Sundgot)
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It's worth noting, however, that the final version of the device will offer some changes to the keyboard (as well as other aspects), and in particular so to the navigational pad which doubles as a mouse cursor that can be called upon when browsing web sites in the Opera browser.
Transitioning into the software aspect of the 9500, it's a bit surprising that the device will not be available until the fourth quarter; except for being based on Symbian OS 7.0, there seem to be few changes to the applications bundled with the operating system. To be fair, though, there's quite a bit of new functionality including GPRS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, all of which were demonstrated and seemed to work just fine - even in a crowded environment where spectrum was at a premium. Also, one major improvement to the 9500 is that all of the settings for the device have been shuffled into one dialog, removing the ever-present element of confusion found among anything less than experienced users of the 9200 series.
Other interesting aspects of the 9500 include its ability to record and play video at decent frame rates, and native support for playback of MP3 - the latter loud and clear, thanks to an excellent loudspeaker. There did not appear to be any industry standard port for audio output, however, so future owners will be restricted to Nokia accessories for this purpose.
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