Engaging with Communications

Nokia 9000 Communicator

Released in 1996

Network = GSM 900MHz

Weight = 397 g

Dimensions = 173mm x 64mm x 38mm

Battery Life = 180 mins talk time and 2100 mins standby

The Nokia 9000 was announced at the CeBIT exhibition in 1996 as the first in their communicator range and the world's first all-in-one mobile communications tool. It had two interfaces, the phone interface shown in the upper picture in which it functioned as a conventional mobile phone and the communicator interface shown in the lower picture where it opened to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard and large screen. Nokia used the term interfaces to stress the point that these two functions were being provided by the same underlying hardware and that this device was not simply two devices enclosed within the same case. So, your address book on the phone interface was the same as the contacts within the communicator interface and so on. Internally it had 8MB of memory of which 4 MB was used for its GEOSTM 3.0 operating system, 2 MB for programs and 2 MB for user data and it was powered by an Intel 24MHz 386 microprocessor.

In addition to all of the basic phone, address book (contacts) and SMS functions, the Nokia 9000 had a document handling and editing feature called Notes, a fully featured calendar and diary application, a clock showing world time and including an alarm, Composer for creating your own ringtones and alerts, a currency converter and connection to a PC via an Infra-red port through which documents could be exchanged and software downloaded and installed. However, the most important feature was the provision of Internet and WWW services provided using Nokia's Smart Messaging - a precursor to the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP). These services were supported through a Nokia web browser, an SMTP, MIME and POP3 compliant email client, and Telnet and Terminal programs for remote access to computing services using VT100 emulation. It must be remembered that in the late 1990s when the Nokia 9000 was launched, the web was still in its infancy and so providing fully integrated Internet and WWW access within a mobile was very much at the technological cutting edge.

The revolutionary, futuristic and innovative design of the Nokia 9000 saw it starring in the 1997 feature film, The Saint, released by Paramount Pictures. In the film the Saint was played by Val Kilmer and he is seen using the Nokia 9000 throughout the film to get out of tight situations.

The Nokia Communicator range continued with the:

Nokia 9110i released in 1999

Nokia 9210 released in 2000

Nokia 9210i released in 2002

Nokia 9300 released in 2004

Nokia 9500 released in 2004

Nokia E90 released in 2007

The version shown here is a Nokia 9000 released for use on the Orange network (Nokia firmware code RAK-1N).