30th November 2005
The Nokia 9300i is a version of the 9300 smartphone with added WiFi support, due for release in Q1 2006, and it's a tri-band 900/1800/1900 GSM handset with GPRS, EDGE and 802.11g wireless ethernet.
Physically, the Nokia 9300i looks identical to the 9300 apart from the 9300i's new slate grey colour. It's slightly heavier than the 9300, at 172 grams compared to 167 grams. The battery life is slightly better, with a maximum of 8 hours talktime compared to 7 on the old phone, and 230 hours maximum standby time, 30 hours better than the 9300.
Other features are the same - there's a 640x200 pixel internal display, MMC expandable memory (up to 2Gb), Bluetooth, web browser, email client and of course the QWERTY keyboard inside the case.
It's a much smaller handset than the 9500 Communicator though, which weighs a whopping 230 grams. However, the 9500 has a larger screen (although it's the same resolution), much better battery life and a basic camera too.
This is a Symbian Series 80 smartphone that can be expanded with other applications such as BlackBerry and Visto email clients, plus other applications developed for the 9300 and 9500 range.
WiFi connectivity on the 9500 is very good, so we assume that the 9300i has the same qualities as the 9500, which should mean that the 9300i can connect pretty much anywhere without problems. This puts the 9300i at an advantage over the Nokia 770 Internet Tablet, which we found had very poor WiFi connectivity when testing.
On crucial thing missing from the Nokia 9300i is 3G support, although EDGE is great.. if you have it. The large screen and decent web browser, along with the capable email client would really benefit from 3G, but there's still no sign of this in any 9000 series device. So while we think that the 9300i's WiFi capabilities are a useful addition to this clever device, what we are really waiting for is the 3G version of this handset.
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