After teething problems, I now love it.!!
Written: Feb 19 '05 (Updated Apr 12 '05)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Superb screen & clarity
Vastly changed Symbian layout.
Extra memory, 2Gb MMC limit
Cons: keyboard tricky poor layout
Battery life poor
inexplicable menu changes
Poor battery compartment layout
The Bottom Line: After 6 weeks living with this, and after Nokia replaced my early phone, I now could not function without it.
Nokia need to improve the firmware though.
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| bomec's Full Review: P3 International P5085 Answering Machine |
Update April 12/05
After my intial bad experience with this phone, Nokia have finally replaced it with a brand new handset with v4.51 firmware and it resolves all the problems listed below. Credit to Nokia for taking notice of the problems.
I still have reservations about the keyboard layout, although as with most things I am getting used to it and making fewer typing errors.
I am also discovering more superb aspects of this phone such as the GPRS counters, the WiFi packet counters, and the ability to dial numbers embedded within a Word document. This is a very clever phone. Not to mention the reflective screen enabling use in full Spanish sunlight. Amazing.
However, the battery I think is too small, with no facility for a double size battery, and if you use if heavily it needs charging within the day, and if you use WiFi you need a spare battery which I have now ordered. WiFi burns battery pretty quickly.
Overall, I am now beginning to love it, put up with the small number of shortcomings, on the basis that there really is nothing else which compares. I am changing the rating now to 4* since Nokia have resolved the bugs I encountered.
Update Mar 17th 05
Nokia clearly have a major problem with this phone.
There are more postings on the FOrums highlighting major problems with the firmware on this phone. And there are increasingly unhappy customers.
http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/forum/showthread.php?t=34126
The dealers have been sent v 4.51 firmware to supposedly solve the problems but even Nokia support centres are unable to make the revised software downloads run and install. My support centre has 4 customers waiting, unable to deal with them, and Nokia has ignored the dealer's request for help.
If anyone is thinking of buying this phone, I would say look into it carefully before you commit.
Update 4 Mar 05
Continued use of the 9500 makes me even less impressed.
Battery life is not as good as the 9210i. There are significant bugs in the Word application causing display errors.
When I installed PC Suite it failed to recognise the supplied USB cable, failed to find the appropriate driver, and it was impossible to connect the phone to PC. I had to uninstall PC Suite 3 times to eventually get it going. There is nothing in the manual dealing with this, and it is appalling.
Club Nokia were disgraceful, suggesting that I need to download a new driver from Nokia.com. They suggest the PC Suite software may be not up to date. This is on a product which has been out only weeks, was launched by Vodafone only last week. And when I protested they simply referred me back to my Network Provider.
Club Nokia also refused to provide any assistance with WLAN security keys. This is disgraceful failure to support their own product. It is Nokia who supplied the product, and have shipped a product which does not function out of box.
I am still within my 14 day return period, and this one is going back. My 9210i is much much better.
DAta Mover does not work correctly. I have 3 contacts Databases on my 9210i and they transferred to my 9500 but are not visible to PC Suite so cannot be edited. ALso Data Mover manages to merge all 3 databases into one huge one, causing a massive job of separating them manually. It is unacceptable.
PC Suite crashes almost every time I use it and has 3 times now sent Fault Reports to Microsoft. And switching from Contacts to Telephone it crashes as well. There are stack of other people suffering from crashes as well.
View http://www.allaboutsymbian.com/forum/showthread.php?p=218264#post218264
Feb 20. I have had a 9500 for 2 days. These are my first impressions of the Nokia 9500 “out of the box”. I am a long time user and fan of 9210 and 9210i, and am comparing it with those.
Immediately I found that it is far more difficult to hold the phone in my hands and to type. The case is now less square and more rounded and this makes it much more “slippery” and makes it quite hard to hold firmly.
The keyboard is nice in some ways, not nice in others, and seems far more difficult to use overall. The old 9210 had space between each button key which was a little like Braille and made it very easy to type and feel one’s way around the keyboard. That is no longer the case and the keys are so smooth, so flat and so close together with no spaces between, that one is bound to look at the keyboard rather than touch type in order to see which key is which.
The joystick button is OK but tricky to use and frequently reacts and moves in the direction not intended. You have to be very careful using this joystick. The menu key is now on the outer corner, and the joystick just inside from the edge, and I find this setup is more difficult to use in practice so far. I have no doubt that I will get used to it but I doubt that it is as natural a layout as the 9210 which seemed ideally setup to toggle between the keys with one’s thumb. I have at the moment reverted to my 9210. It is interesting that the keyboard layout on the 9300 is NOT the same as the 9500 and I suspect the 9300 layout is closer to that of the 9210.
The joystick also does not appear to work with all programmes (so far games) and in some you HAVE to use the arrow keys which are not in a good position on the keyboard for regular use.
The space bar is quite narrow (although the same 3 key width of the 9210) but crucially has been shifted one key position to the left underneath the VBN keys instead of the BNM keys on the 9210i. This may suit left-handed typists, I do not know, but it certainly is not very good for me and I am getting constant mistyping. This is especially so since the key to the right of the spacebar is now the left arrow and if you miss the spacebar which is now far more likely you do not just type a wrong character but you find that the typing cursor has moved you up the document and your typing ends up in a real mess. During typing I have found I constantly doing this, hitting the left arrow key instead of the space bar and it causes chaos in my typing. Try it before you buy; this aspect is awful. I am already utterly fed up with this and I have only had the machine a short while.
The case of the 9500 feels solid except for the removable panels, which appear flimsy compared to the 9210. It is quite tricky to get off the battery cover. It is thin and fragile, and has two little plastic hooks which I am certain will break off pretty soon in use just like the battery cover on most people’s TV remote controls. That presumably will mean buying a replacement cover. You cannot swap the MMC card without removing this cover also. Therefore this fragile cover is bound to be removed very often.
The battery itself is then a dog to remove, and I had to resort to a small screwdriver to lever it out. You cannot change the SIM card without removing the battery either, so those of us used to swapping SIMS are going to find this very irritating. It seems to me they could have made the MMC removable via a small slot in the back cover without having to remove the cover at all, rather like a Memory Stick slot.
Similarly, the front cover is supposed to be an Xpress on cover, but to date the release catch on mine has jammed and I cannot even get my cover off for fear of breaking the flimsy plastic or some similar fragile plastic hooks which are almost certainly behind, and will surely break if I have to force it.
The screen is fantastic, razor sharp, very bright and text is clear and fantastic to read.
In word and sheet the range of zoom levels is as one used to get with EPOC on the Psion Series 5 and even at the smallest zoom size text is crystal clear. BUT why is this range of zoom levels not available in all applications like Calendar and Email? Even on the 9210 I have never understood why the range of zoom levels in Email and Calendar are fewer than in other applications. Calendar is one of the applications where it is really important to be able to see as much of a day’s appointments as possible in one screen. And similarly if you receive dozens of emails then why are we restricted to seeing a small number in quite large print when to be able to zoom down and see many more on the screen at a time would make a big difference. I do not understand why this is not addressed in new releases of Symbian. It was already available in earlier versions of EPOC on Psion Revo & Series 5 for example, so why does Nokia not deal with this on these new products?
Icons for battery and signal strength have changed to white instead of black, which against a pale blue background is pretty daft and makes them hard to see. There appears to be no facility to change this and whilst the user can change the desktop wallpaper, these are all minor variations on pale blue. Why?? What on earth is the point in supplying numerous wallpapers, all of which are virtually identical?
With a limited size screen the ease with which you can switch in and out of full size matters, especially in the web browser. On the 9210 Full Screen was 6 lines down on the web view menu. On the 9210i this sensibly changed to top position. Bizarrely on the 9500 this has changed back again, to 4th down the menu. Goodness knows why.
The speaker quality on the 9500 seems much less good than on the 9210. My voice sounded tinny, and oddly slightly faster and slightly higher pitched than the same recording on my 9210. There is no indication in the documentation of where on the phone the microphone is situated so as to be able to speak directly into it. There seems to be no compressed speech option under the settings either. I don’t particularly like the fact that the phone earpiece is now on the phone side next to the small screen which means that the screen will get greasy from my ear like any other phone. Conversely that was a big advantage of the old 9210 - that never happened.
In imaging the assignment of screen buttons has been changed, and it is no longer quick to zoom in and out using the screen buttons. You either have to zoom using 2 keys (Ctrl Zoom) or via menus via at least 4 steps and each further change in zoom level is another 4 steps. I don’t understand why zoom in and out was removed from the screen buttons. Conversely one of the screen buttons has now been assigned to “Send”. Since MMS is expensive and something many of us will do far less often than viewing our own pictures, then I cannot understand why this has been made very quick, yet viewing and zooming has been made far more difficult.
Also the 9500 has a letterbox screen yet Nokia have seen fit to impose the file title in a title bar along the top of the screen, further reducing the height of the image. And unlike Word and Sheet, there seems to be no facility to suppress this title bar and expand the image area. Pretty clever given the limited height of the screen anyway given the widescreen format of the phone. Why??
Compatibility may also be an issue. I put my MMC from my 9210 into my 9500 and whilst the 9500 can see my 3 Contacts Databases, is could not open any of the data giving me an error message. So much for compatibility with such a fundamental built in application on this phone. So at present I am not able to use my new phone because my Contacts files are not readable, so I am continuing to use my trusty 9210i. Not very impressive Nokia.
I bought the 9500 mainly for the higher resolution screen and the WiFi. If WiFi works like a dream then I may end up happy with my 9500. But at the moment I can see as many (if not more) disadvantages as advantages and I am even considering sticking with the 9210i which I think is still a terrific device. My conclusion is that maybe focussing on size and weight at the expense of how this device works in practice may be a mistake. That may be why the speaker is not as good. That is certainly why the keyboard is so small as to be barely useable. That is why much of the casing is too flimsy. Those people who want a tiny phone first and foremost surely do not buy 9500’s. Those who buy 9500’s want a fully functioning phone with no major limitations and size and weight is way down the list of priorities. A few grammes off the weight is not worth having if the keyboard and other little things drive you nuts. So I am very glad I did not buy the 9300 with an even smaller format and an even more miniscule keyboard. I think I would have had to send it back.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
bomec
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Location: London UK
Reviews written: 8
Trusted by: 0 members
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