The Nokia 9300 is not a bad phone, but there are various small bad things about it. Summed up, they made the 9300 look bad to me. The keypad, for one thing, looks like a prototype's keypad more than a grown-up's one: it's not backlight and it feels terrible. For some reason, it doesn't always dial as quickly as you type. It doesn't have a camera and I assume that it's to satisfy some companies who don't want their employees to have one. But they should have offered an optional version with a camera.

Seemingly separated at birth, the physical differences between the 9300i and its predecessor are minimal with identical physical measurements of 132 x 51 x 21 mm and a 5 g weight gain up to 172g.

The front of the smartphone is equipped with a LCD display that supports 65k colors and 128x128 resolution. We can’t say we are too impressed with the interface. It’s too bland, boring and uninteresting. The least Nokia could’ve done was update the interface to make it look somewhat modern, but unfortunately they chose otherwise. As much as we dislike saying this, a lot of entry level phones from Motorola and Samsung have better looking interfaces than the 9300i.

With that out of the way, the real magic of the 9300i isn’t revealed until you flip it open to reveal the "real" LCD display. The communicator display supports 640x200 resolution, active transflective color display, 65k colors and adjustable brightness control. The amount of workspace you get with the communicator display is downright amazing. For reading webpages and documents, it beats the Treo and BlackBerry hands down. You don’t have to scroll as much as you would with other devices. Furthermore, the applications suite you get is incredible. You are essentially getting a portable suite of Microsoft Office with a few other applications to get some work done wherever you are. Typing a report or editing a spreadsheet was a pleasure, but Powerpoint editor was substandard. Even though it’s possible to create an entire PowerPoint presentation on the 9300i, it’s as tedious as it can be. Unless you absolutely need to make a quick presentation, we wouldn’t recommend the 9300i for such tasks.

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Standard battery, Li-Po 1100 mAh (BP-6M)
Stand-by Up to 230 h
Talk time Up to 8 h

The battery is a 970mAh Li-Ion unit. It is user replaceable, so if you're away from power at long intervals it's easy to swap in a new battery. Nokia quotes 200 hours standby or 4.5 hours of talk. I got a touch less than two days with moderate usage, which is about par for a device like this.

The 9300i has a competent MP3 player, so coupling this with a decent set of headphones through the standard Nokia Pop Port and you’ll be able to have music on the move. I’m not the greatest fan of music on mobiles (see here ) but dropping a 512MB MMC card into the 9300i, along with using either the Nokia Music Manager, direct access to the drives in the PC Suite, or direct file copiying using a card reader, means that the phone can be used as an MP3 player. I’m not sure how many people will use the 9300i as their primary music device – having to open up the device to access any controls is a big problem, as is the basic user interface. But for carrying the occasional track, or for opening it up to demo the latest “Crazy Frog doing Doctor Who” MP3 ringtone, the 9300i can do the job.

The same goes for video. The bundled RealPlayer handles .rm files, plus the Nokia .3gp (H.263 and MPEG-4) and MP4 formats. The smallish screen height of 200 pixels is actually a bonus here as it forces you to re-encode your video (via the PC Suite) to a smaller size, which helps the playback rate, although only the central part of the screen is used. It’s good to have RealPlayer onboard, but you’re not going to be watching anything longer than a few minutes before you start protesting. And, weirdly, the Image Gallery is still in there. Without a digital camera built-in, this is going to get almost zero use except to slowly browse pre-loaded photos. I suspect they didn’t want to take anything out the standard Series 80 build.

The unit comes with 80MB of memory--a very generous allotment compared to the Sony Ericsson P910a's 64MB--and you can add an additional 2GB through the aforementioned MMC slot.

The Nokia 9300 uses a tri-band GSM radio with support for EDGE. It also includes Bluetooth and infrared, but does not offer WiFi. The EDGE network will offer fast download speeds if it's offered in your area. At the moment this is limited to Cingular, though T-Mobile is rumored to be rolling out EDGE ever so quietly.

I was able to pair several devices with the 9300. The only problem is that to accept an incoming pair request, you have to open up the 9300. The same sort of thing happens when beaming business cards via IR. This isn't a huge problem, but a minor annoyance if you connect with new Bluetooth devices or receive business cards over IR frequently.

The Cingular package includes the phone, a USB 2.0 sync cable (Nokia Connectivity Cable DKU-2), standard Nokia world charger, Pop-Port mono headset, CD-ROM with PC Suite, PDF manuals and other companion software. The 900/1800/1900MHz non-Cingular version comes with a mono Pop-Port headset, charger, desk cradle (for syncing and charging), software CD, printed manual and a 128 MB MultiMedia Card. Only the US Cingular version of the Nokia 9300 includes BlackBerry Connect software.