Nokia 9300 Test Drive

Got hold of Nokia 9300 smartphone for a day. My uncle has bought this handset. He handed it over to me for a test drive / setup kind of stuff. Was experimenting with it for all the time today morning.

I always thought that my Nokia 6600 was kind of bulky, but after using this, i am kind of happy ;). This one is bigger, and heavier too. But it looks cool. Infact, it looks very professional. Kind of very high tech.

Ok. Coming to my observation…

The only major difference feature wise between nokia 9300 and nokia 6600 is the keyboard or keypad. Otherwise both the phones have more or less the same features, including most of the software (not all). 6600 has a camera/imaging functions. Nokia 9300 does not have it. Its cousin nokia 9500 has the camera too.

The screen is kind of too narrow. 640*200 (w*h). Like an tower. The aspect ratio is 3.2:1. On the other hand, nokia 6600 is 176*208 (h*w) pixels.

Nokia 9300 runs on Series 80 platform. The UI is pretty neat, but i found that it lacks consistency. Could have been better. And since it runs on a series 80 platform (s80) , the programs that run on s60, (i.e., nokia 6600) wont directly run on Nokia 9300. You have to find the appropriate versions.

I managed to get Smart Movie player, and Ultra MP3 for Nokia 9300. Ultra mp3 player rocks on 9300. But when it comes to smart movie player, the broad screen is of little use. Most of the screen is unused. I also installed some games on it. Clearly, 9300 is not a gaming machine.

One very good thing about nokia 9300 is the response time. The UI is pretty fast and responsive at most of the times compared to Nokia 6600. Also, lot of stuff is natively supported. For e.g., you can open word docs, spreadsheets, presentations etc. But in case of Nokia 6600, you need to add some additional software. The same is the case with MP3 playback. Also found that the bluetooth transfer works much faster with this phone. It rocks. Internal memory is 80 MB, which is one major plus point.

Nokia 9300, current cost in Bangalore/India - around 30K INR
Nokia 6600, current cost in Bangalore/India - around 11.5K INR

At the end of it, i am still happy with Nokia 6600 :) One major plus point about nokia 6600 is … there are tons of software already available for it, and its very popular, and affordable.

18 comments | July 17th, 2005 at 08:17pm