Nokia 9500 and its little brother, the Nokia 9300 series, are the successors to Nokia’s last generation of Communicator devices such as the 9290 Communicator. The new generation of devices continues to target the enterprise market with a wide screen and full QWERTY keyboard that resembles a mini laptop. These new devices run on Symbian OS 7 with Series 80 UI and are packed with full PIM applications, an office suite and easy synchronization with PCs.

The new Communicator is both smaller and lighter than the 9200. It weighs 222 g (22 g less) and measures 148 x 57 x 24 mm (it is 10 mm shorter and 4 mm thinner). Not much less, but still less, and with lots of new features inside.

Smaller casing has been achieved mainly because of moving the loudspeaker to the right side (or top, depending on how you look at it) of the device and getting rid of the external antenna. And those 10x4 mm and 22 g really make a difference! The device looks and feels smaller and is much more comfortable to handle and carry.

Like all Communicators, the 9500 is equipped with two screens - large PDA screen inside and small phone screen outside. As opposed to the 9210, the phone screen of the 9500 is now 16-bit color TFT matrix (128 x 128 pixels). It is of high quality and its white background makes it very clear even without backlight (which doesn't happen too often as the backlight turns on automatically on any key press).

The PDA screen is of the same 640x200 resolution, but now it is 16-bit (65,536 colors), too. Its quality can be described with just one word: amazing. It is much brighter than 9210's display, colors are vivid and the contrast is very high. Both contrast and brightness can be adjusted in Control Panel, there is also a keyboard shortcut for quick brightness adjustment (four levels). The screen is covered by an anti-reflective layer - one can hardly notice any difference in quality even in direct sunlight.

A quick peek at the back reveals the integrated 0.3 Megapixel camera which isn't much to brag about in terms of resolution, yet offers more than adequate image quality.

Standard battery, Li-Ion 600 mAh (BL-5X).
Battery life is very good at 11 hours, 5 minutes of talk time and more than a week of standby (though that's sure to drop if you use Wi-Fi).

Nokia 9500 is a work-orientated device, it also has several options, which could be called entertaining. The first one is the MP3 player. Even though Nokia delivers the communicator with only a simple handsfree set with one headphone, it is also possible to connect stereo headphones to the Pop-Port. You could find them in the Nokia 6630 (HDS-3 model) package. Besides MP3 Nokia also supports sound formats as AMR, WAV, MIDI, AAC and AWB. They all could be used for ringer sounds, especially the MIDI format with 24-voice polyphony.

One of the applications is the video. There is a RealPlayer installed in the communicator. It plays not only stream videos but also 3GP and MP4 formats. Therefore you may easily record a film on the memory card and play it on Nokia afterwards. Unfortunately the comfort when watching a video is limited by the size of the display.

Phonebook Practically unlimited entries and fields, Photocall
Call records Practically unlimited
Card slot MMC
- 80 MB shared internal memory
- Symbian 7.0S, Series 80 UI

The Nokia 9500 is a triband GSM cell phone that operates on 900/1800/1900 MHz.
The communicator's claim to fame has always been its connectivity and the 9500 doesn't disappoint. On the cellular side of things it offers HSCDS, GPRS and EGPRS (EDGE) which gives you theoretical top speeds of just over 200kbps. Some may point out the lack of proper 3G data facilities as a rather serious omission but in the UK, at least, 3G services have not yet reached the coverage (and cost) at which I would seriously consider using them. By they time they do, I wouldn't be surprised if a new communicator model had come out to take advantage of them. The configuration of the data facilities is very simple and the phone takes all the settings from the SIM card and then creates the separate connections for GRPS, WAP and MMS.

On the non-cellular side of things, the 9500 has Bluetooth and WiFi. The Bluetooth can be switched on or off using a keyboard short cut but the default state is controlled through the settings menu. When activated, a little Bluetooth rune appears on the left of the screen. The WiFi can be set to search for wireless networks at regular intervals and although it doesn't announce it when it finds one, a small 'W' appears in the same place as the Bluetooth blob (see pictures above). There's also an option to automatically deactivate Bluetooth when using the WiFi since both operate on the same frequency and although they can be used simultaneously, it increases the likelihood of problems.

The 9500 comes with Nokia's PC Suite which allows you to synchronise your phone with Outlook (or Lotus Notes) via either cradle and cable (see first picture of the 9500), infrared or Bluetooth. All three seem to work well although the transfer speed for large files such as MP3 is not exactly rapid and, on my computer, if the Bluetooth card has been deactivated it takes a few minutes for PS Suite to realise that the 9500 is nearby before syncing. The PC Suite also includes a number of other programs such as a SMS sender and contact editor but to be honest, most of these are intended for Nokia's other phones and are superfluous since almost everything can be either done in Outlook on or the phone itself.

The 9500 uses Opera as its internet browser and the 'Fit to page' function coupled with the 640 pixel wide screen make internet browsing about as pain free as is possible on a palmtop (I know that some of the newer PocketPCs have VGA screens but the text on them is microscopic). When you open the web browser you're greeted with the Nokia logo and a link to the mobile version of Nokia's website.

The package includes the Nokia 9500, a syncing and charging desk cradle, USB 2.0 connectivity cable, AC charger, Pop-Port mono headset, 128MB MultiMedia Card, CD-ROM with PC Suite and bundled companion desktop software and a printed user manual.