Juan Manuel Grijalvo - Nokia 9210 - English version
For Gemma, because of her decissive help to get over my Nokia's teething troubles
If you have already got a Nokia 9210 ...
This page has a link from my "Advertisements" page.
Yet it is not paid publicity.
Neither are the other ones. As stated in the heading, they are just my recommendations.
This is an attempt at explaining my reactions facing a prodigious machine...
When you lay your hands on it, the first thing that you see is the screen's beauty. It's incredibly pretty. For an user ot the austere monochrome Psion presentations, the 9210 is an explosion in 4096 colours, that shines like a star - indoors, of course. In a bright day near the Mediterranean seaside it is a bit hard to read. In Finland the Sun is not that fierce and it must be perfect.
Now the keyboard is no better than that of the Psion 5. I've had no trouble to work with it, because I started with a Psion 3a and have always used it two-thumbs fashion, as all of us Old Psioneers. All of them work and I intend to keep them all working as long as I can afford it.
As to the application buttons, we Psionites start using them in half a second. They are just our well-known toolbar. We find there all these little useful things that make us love so much our Psion computers.
The next thing you discover is how incredibly light it is. When someone says that it's too big, I just put it on his/her hand. "Well, it doesn't weigh that much..." And you start to name the parts: the upper half contains the antenna, the screen and the phone keyboard outside, and the computer screen and four function buttons inside. Then, the lower half has the keyboard, loudspeaker, microphone, the SIM chip, the RAM card, the battery and the telephone loudspeaker... And where is the CPU? And the ROM chip? I should say that you could not slip a postage stamp anywhere in the machine's innards, but...
The incredible amount of functions in the machine implies a certain amount of complexity. To get all the correct configurations set by hand is quite a job. In Spain at least, you do it by trial and error, and you must phone a number of times to your operator's hotline, until you find someone that knows which sort of apparatus you are speaking about... Of course, as Nokia keeps selling them at a healthy rate, everything will become easier. All the software and configurations will be preloaded, or installed via a PC connection, by following a simple menu. Right now, the best course is to find a "pringao". This is Spanish slang. I do not know the English matching word. Please help me... He / she is a gullible person who undertakes the job of getting your machine into operation, while you give him / her several pieces of your mind because of his / her unheard-of slowness and incompetence, of course... I believe that this sort of people does not exist abroad.
Now seriously, you won't find irresoluble problems. Make sure that the programme versions in the computer AND THE RAM CARD are up to date and coherent; maybe, the machine has been for some time in the shop, so... You do this from the Control Panel, in Install/Uninstall. You find there a full listing of the software, complete with the relevant version numbers. The very competent Nokia hotline staff will tell you if everything is up to date and in working order. If it is not... the only remedy is to send the whole machine to the workshop, to rewrite the ROM memory.
The first thing you will do is to start inputting appointments and anniversaries in the Agenda. Psion users won't find major changes. Other people, probably, will be rendered speechless as they grasp the programme's incredible comprehensiveness, versatility and ease of use. As far as I know, it runs miles ahead of the concurrence last "findings". Most remarkable: Agenda is substantially the same tool I got with my Psion 3a... in 1994. That's one for the English.
A big improvement in Psion 5 over Psion 3 was the facility of pausing alarms without opening the machine. But sooner or later, you had to open it to acknowledge them, so the hinges and that flat connecting cable worked... yet another time. The brilliant Nokia idea is to display them in the phone screen, where you can fully deal with them with the menu keys. For me, a heavy alarm user, this is a true blessing.
The sound quality is better than good. You can set a different ringtone for every single record in Contacts, and the computer will store hundreds of .RNG files in a small corner in the RAM card, so I have got something I longed for since I got my first mobile phone: I know who is calling before picking the receiver... BTW, I was not aware of that when I bought it.
And you know that my pocket computers are like pets for me. Now, the 'low battery' message - icon and sound - is... you must see and hear it. It is not too easy: the battery endurance is one of the strongest points in the Nokia sales speech. So, you must wait for it, it's well worthwhile. Quite probably, I would have bought it just by this lovely, lovely way of begging for food, and the satisfaction of feeding it... No, I never kept a Tamagotchi.
But... this was not just a phone? Hey you, don't mistake me... Of course, you can use it just to talk and send SMS. But where a good GSM phone offers you a menu, this one has a true application. When you grow used to calling from your contact records, by pressing just one button, you will be left wondering how could you manage life with that very short list in your SIM memory...
And die-hard Psioneers yield and go over to the enemy with all our guns and kit as soon as we manage to connect it to our chosen ISP, read and answer our email, and browse the Internet with that outstanding image quality... I am at a loss for words. You must see it to believe it.
As total perfection is not found in this world, there are some annoying absences. I miss Data. This Psionist has collected all sorts of info, from Tolkien quotations to shopping lists, in hundreds of Data files. So, for the time being, I keep my Psion 5 in its Vega belt holster, by the Nokia... If this makes me look like the Lonely Ranger, I will live with it... Of course, third-party apps are appearing real fast in the marketplace. When I decide which one to use, I will update this page. But I seriously doubt that I will ever find something so very much to my liking as Purple Software's DataView Pro. It ran on my Psion 3a, and allowed me to do exactly everything I wished to do with all my Data files while I kept them in the 3a. The Data files in the Psion 5 have several shortcomings... Now and then, "progress" does not really carry us forward, you know...
Another very annoying absence is, no Javascript in the browser. To address this, Nokia has seen fit to make a new machine, the improved 9210i, complete with a special version of Opera, the same programme of the Psion Revo. It is to be hoped that the candid souls who bought the "Classic" 9210 will be offered a firmware update. I don't mind to be without the machine for some time, while the ROM gets rewritten, and saying goodbye to some of my hard-earned euros too... The browser is a key app, and to manage Java applets is a "sine qua non" requisite to access password-protected sites... Banks, online shops, all that jazz. You see, this is not a minor issue. If you are pondering to buy one, it may well be wise to wait a bit until we see if Nokia decides to sell this browser to the first customers or not. So far my news are that they won't, and I'm not pleased, not pleased at all.
Please report spelling and grammar errors in this page to : juan_manuel@grijalvo.com
Some links about computers by yours truly
La carga útil de un ordenador : La solución Psion - Symbian - Nokia 9210 (translation pending...)
Computers as Ring-like devices (meant only for Middle-earth citizens)
If you have already got a Nokia 9210 ...
The Tech-Slacky Howto, by Santiago Romero:
anti-Win, pro-Linux, most things he says do fit EPOC-Symbian
Nokia 9290 (USA) - (official) ...
PALMTOP : the very best magazine for Symbian users ...