Mention Nokia 9300, and you are sure to draw a few envious glances. That's the effect of carrying a Nokia Communicator ... correction, a Nokia smartphone.

For starters, the 9300i is more evolutionary than revolutionary. Nokia has relabeled the earlier 9300 - as 9300i - retaining the square body and the clamshell PDA design. This one is not flashy; nor were its predecessors.

The difference between the 9300i and the 9300 is singular: the inclusion of Wi-Fi in the former. Nokia hasn't gone in for any major firmware/application or even 3G upgrade. As the phone is directed towards business users, the addition of Wi-Fi is worthwhile.

The 9300i shares physical measurements of its predecessor Nokia 9300 at 132 x 51 x 21 mm and weighs about 172 gram. Sporting an arguably more attractive colour scheme, the exteriors offer a comfortable keypad.

While the lack of a camera in a smartphone might irritate a few, Nokia claims to understand its customers. The device is tailored to a specific group, squarely speaking, business users on the move. And, camera certainly is not a priority for this class, feels the Finnish major.

What's in it?

The device is a Series 80-derived cover phone. A 640x200 pixel screen, a full QWERTY keyboard, cursor keys and a joystick, it has nothing that might surprise the Nokia 9500 or 9300 user.

You could get cross over a rather cramped placement of keys but when compared with Palm Treo and Sony Ericsson P910i, the benefits become clearer. The sooner you learn to type with one hand while holding the 9300i with the other, the better for you (if at all you wish to buy one).

During testing, the cursor joystick became the most unusable tool. I found myself struggling to find which direction was up, down, left or right. One miss and the cursor hits in another direction. It can be highly annoying while surfing.

Also, the integration of 802.11g connectivity in the 9300i is a welcome escape from the bulk of Nokia 9500. Wi-Fi security is boosted with wired equivalent privacy (WEP), Wi-Fi protected access and LEAP (a Cisco security technology that builds on Wi-Fi's WEP encryption) but setting up an access point manually is a daunting task.

The access point has to be within prescribed range and cannot have a hidden service set identifier - a set of characters that give a unique name to a wireless local area network.

Noticeably, the 9300i doesn't add anything new to the Series 80 applications package. However, it comes with the latest Nokia PC Suite. Talk about syncing the contacts and calendar data to Windows PC, 9300i does it pretty well.

It supports EDGE, five-person conference calling (via an integrated speakerphone) and multiple email clients (with attachments), including BlackBerry Connect, Nokia Business Centre, IBM WebSphere, Oracle Collaboration Suite, Seven Always-On Mail and Visto Mobile. The smartphone is also packed with infrared and bluetooth capabilities.

Needs add-ons

Nokia 9300i has a competent word processor, spreadsheet application and PowerPoint viewer, something that has not changed since the launch of 9500 or 9300 series.

Sadly, it does not include a spell checker and thesaurus that were a part of the documents application in Nokia 9210i. Nokia 9300i users are required to buy additional solutions from Nokia or turn to third-party vendors.

Although there are several add-on solutions, courtesy Nokia's Business Centre that recommends Seven Always-On Mail, Visto email or BlackBerry Connect.

Nokia's Opera is a solid browser but the 150Mhz processor can play truant, especially while viewing sites with heavy HTML layouts. With the 9300 it was not so pronounced because the erstwhile GPRS download rates masked its speed. Inclusion of Wi-Fi throws light on the poor web experience.

What all can an underpowered processor do? In the worst case, it can make applications slowdown by two to four seconds (delay in opening). As a result Opera, an otherwise a good web browser, is unable to exploit the full potential of a Wi-Fi connection.

Can it play an MP3?

The 9300i has a capable MP3 player. Just add a 2GB MMC card to the existing 80 MB memory and it's ready to work as an MP3 player. The question is why would people use the 9300i as a music device as it needs to be opened to access any controls, something that can be tedious.

A RealPlayer can be fun to watch a few videos but it's not recommended to watch anything beyond a few minutes.  The battery power, while testing, extended up to 3-4 hours and promises a battery standby of another comfortable 8 hours.

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