Sept/Oct 2004

The blurring of lines between smart phones and handheld computers is taken a further stage with Nokia's latest all-singing all-dancing tri-band 9300 model, which is due to appear early next year.

When closed, it looks and works like a normal mobile phone, but it opens up to reveal a full keyboard and wide colour screen. That much is not perhaps so remarkable; it's when you look at what's included that it really starts to seem ground-breaking.

Features include 80 MB of memory, expandable up to 2 GB with an optional MMC card; Bluetooth audio support for hands-free conversations; USB connectivity for easy data transfer or synchronisation; email client support for IMAP4, POP3, SMTP, SyncML and BlackBerry Connect; a range of security features including SSL/TLS, IPsec VPN, personal firewall and anti virus software; and high-speed Internet browsing, with support for HTML/XHTML, HTML 4.01 and JavaScript 1.3.

If all that doesn't make it a PDA, we don't know what will. There's also an inbuilt office applications suite supporting documents, spreadsheets and presentations, plus a PDF viewer and MP3 and multimedia player.

 

The operating system, by the way, is Symbian, and uses its Series 80 icon-driven interface.