February 28th, 2006
Technology Tortoise
Nokia has today regained it’s position as market leader in mobile phones.
I fail to see how.
I had a Nokia 6510 that made and received phone calls. It had a calendar that allowed me to set reminders to call people at certain times. At the specified time I just pressed one button to call them. It had a stopwatch.
It was basic, but it had everything I needed, and it worked.
Then the speaker died. No problem, except for when I wanted to hear the morning alarm. I persevered for 18 months.
Finally the on/off button fell out and I had to remove the covers every time I needed to turn it on or off.
My wife eventually convinced me to upgrade. So I upgraded to a Nokia 7610, built on the Symbian OS.
What a crock of shite.
It is the size of a housebrick, yet still has tiny keys that my fingers can’t hit. It’s like the King-Size Homer episode of The Simpsons where Homer decides to put on weight so he can work from home. “The fingers you have used to dial are too fat. To obtain a special dialing wand please mash the keypad with your palm now”.
It’s calendar does not allow me to set a reminder to call someone. Duh. What else do I want a calendar for on a phone? I’m certainly not going to organise my whole life on it.
Editing contacts is a pain in the proverbial. “You got a new number, I’ll just change it in my phone. Oh. Hang on, I press this, then er, no just wait, I’ll get there eventually”.
It has a million and one features I never use. Edit a 128 x 96 pixel movie. Er, no thanks.
It might have a megapixel camera, but with a shutter response of 1 second (I timed it taking pictures of a stopwatch) and poor image quality - despite what you might have read by gushing Nokia apologists back in June 2004 when the phone was launched - I think I’ll stick with the digital SLR.
In short it has become so feature heavy that it no longer usefully serves it’s primary function as a phone.
But the real problem (and I speak as someone who worked for a couple of years developing real time user interfaces for some very complex military hardware), is the speed of the user interface. Or rather complete lack of it.
We have become used to getting a response to our actions instantly. Long gone are the days of the Commodore 64 and a 10 key cache that would slowly catch up with the users typing.
On the 7610 I can hit the keys and it blatantly doesn’t acknowledge them. For instance if this computer had the same response times as the Nokia the last sentence would have come out as “O h 60Icnhtteky n tbaatydentakoldete.”
It really is so bad that simply locking and unlocking it has become a chore as it fails to recognise the unlock key and then spends it’s time eventually drawing a helpful message of which keys to press, all the while I’m stubbornly pressing them.
As a phone it is a step backwards.
I am seriously thinking of going into my service providers shop and returning it.
If slow, clunky handsets are the future of mobile phone technology I want my old phone back. I thought technology was pulling us into the future, not dragging us backwards.
Update: Turns out that despite being three months old, and the last firmware release being twelve months ago it was shipped to me with firmware fifteen months old. One of the fixes in the new firmware is to ‘improve responsiveness’.
We shall see.
![[Valid RSS]](http://32sixteen.com/wp-content/themes/three_column/images/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed")
del.icio.us
March 1st, 2006 at 6:10 pm
Don’t comment - send me an SMS.