Nokia 9210 offers lifeline to Symbian

Nokia's long-awaited 9210 Communicator will be available to UK customers this week. Based on the Symbian platform, the 9210 combines mobile phone and PDA functions, offering email, Internet access, productivity applications and a colour screen.

Retailer Carphone Warehouse plans to offer the device at £500 under contracts with BT Cellnet or Vodafone.

Although several other mobile products have PDA and phone functionality, the 9210 may attract more interest from organisations because of the PersonalJava and C++ support built into the operating system.

Citrix is also making an ICA client available for the 9210, allowing remote access to corporate applications running on servers. PersonalJava is a Java platform allowing mobile clients to execute remote applications.

Announced last November, the 9210 is a milestone for the Symbian platform which has suffered several setbacks recently. Symbian backers Psion and Motorola scrapped a joint smart phone venture in January, adding to the impression that Symbian was losing momentum to rivals such as Palm and Microsoft's various Windows CE platforms.

Some industry watchers believe the 9210 could make or break Symbian. "Symbian hasn't done a good job of marketing its technology," said Mat Hanrahan, an analyst at Bloor Research.

He also expressed doubts about the high-speed circuit-switched data (HSCSD) wireless technology that the 9210 uses to transmit data. HSCSD, operated by the Orange mobile network in the UK, works by aggregating several GSM phone channels together for faster data transfer, but could suffer when networks are congested.

Rolling out devices such as the Communicator across an enterprise can also cause management and support headaches. "The big costs are with back-end application servers and management," said Hanrahan. In recognition of this, Nokia has announced a deal with Computer Associates to work on software for managing mobile clients.

The 9210 resembles a larger than average mobile phone, with a small LCD screen and keypad for making voice calls, but opens up to reveal a full keyboard and a larger colour display. Built-in applications include a word processor, spreadsheet and a viewer for Microsoft PowerPoint presentations.

As well as the ability to compose and send text messages, the device has a built-in email client supporting POP3, IMAP4 and SMTP, sends and receives faxes, and views standard HTML and Wap pages.