Gadget Comparision

I was addicted to Palm – and I love my Treo 650. I am using Palm devices since Palm owned this product category in the good old times. And the short switch to Microsofts mobile platform was disapointing for me. So I expected not very much from the Nokia Communicator, remembering the low performance of this device.

Well, I changed my mind. Using the Nokia Communicator 9300 for a week now I have to admit: it is a great device – although it is still very very slow. But it has lots of other strengths.

Like the Treo the Nokia Communicator is a robust phone AND a good PDA. This is something you should not take for granted. The iPaq device was a good PDA, but an ugly phone. The Communicator is robust, size is not too big, the user interface is clear and streamlined compared to the old fashioned Palm OS. In some ways Palm OS is much simpler, for example entering a calendar entry in the Nokia Communicator requires much more editing of different fields. On the other hand you find application and setting of the Communicator where you expect to find it.

Battery life seems to be very good and the display is brilliant. The Blackberry client installs smoothly and syncs Lotus Notes mail and calendar entries immediatly.

Until now I had no reboots. Only the adress book application crashed while trying to open the contact list with 1.700 contacts which I imported by mistake (Note to myself: never ever sync the device via SyncML with openBC after you synced the device with Lotus Notes via cradle and afterwards Lotus Notes with open BC). But: The Palm would have crashed completly, while the Communicator just killed the adress book application and reloaded it on the PDA system – the phone system continued to work without problems because it has a separat CPU.

So it seems I will stay with the Nokia Communicator for a while. The only thing I miss is the camera. Even if the camera is a no go for business phones I use it a lot for taking pictures and posting it here on the blog. But I think I can cope with this 😉