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Nokia the Next Gizmondo?
An anonymous reader writes, "Yesterday Symbian announced that 100 million Symbian smart phones have shipped to over 250 network operators worldwide since the company's formation. According to a CNet article, however, Nokia phones running on the OS are actually worse than their non-Symbian predecessors. From the article: 'The fact is, Nokia's phones are in danger of turning from the iPods of the phone world into the Gizmondos — from devices dedicated to doing one thing well to jacks-of-all-trades that do too many things poorly. The S60 3rd Edition interface has received tons of criticism from veteran Nokia users for being far too complicated to use. It's great that there's new stuff to play with, but not so great that the old stuff, as in making calls and sending texts, has been made more complicated.'"
The stakes are high, the players are mammoth and everyone is making the same damned mistakes.
Today's smart-phones are actually very stupid; The interfaces are cumbersome, the features over-hyped while underperforming, the battery and performance problems legendary and yet, the mistakes are accumulating rather than being corrected.
In my opinion, the primary problem is that everyone is using the wrong metaphore for these phones. These phones are not mobile computers and should stop being treated as such. They are supposed to be lifestyle devices. Lifestyle devices need to be simple, elegant and stylish. The only manufacturer that has come close, IMHO, is Motorola with the Razor.
Nokia has some nice features, but as the article correctly posits, the interfaces are simply hideous.
Motorola has taken a shotgun approach and has such a wide variety of different offerings that it makes your head scratch. The Razor is a good phone, but it has yet to be seen whether Motorola knows how to parlay that into a spectrum of lifestyle devices of a higher generation.
Sony Ericson makes hideous phones, in my opinion. They may have nice hardware, but the software is simply terrible.
Samsung has a decent compromise in all categories and their phones are quite popular in Asia, but nothing stands out as outstanding.
Windows Mobile? You have to be kidding. I would rather shoot myself in the foot and use the blood to write on big signs that I hold up than navigate through a start menu on my mobile.
But alas, we are shown a possible beacon of light in the smartphone race. Can Apple offer us some innovation in the lifestyle smart-phone department? I certainly hope Apple teaches these other companies what style and simplicity actually are. A device that quickly morphs from one purpose to another, represents each purpose flawlessly and innovates outside-the-box. Simply the addition of iChat compatibility over WiFi would put the iPhone in a class by itself.
But anyhow, let the arguments begin.
The reason that it can be true that 1+1 > 2 is that very peculiar nonzero value of the + operator
No, I love my N73 too, but there are several problems. I'm sure someone somewhere is going to post about how all they want to do is make a call, but that's actually implemented fairly well, although not perfectly. People who want to use the hardware to its full potential are the ones who will suffer! Here are some real issues I've found, and they amaze me:
I could go on and on with this crap, but in summary: The hardware is great, but I'm looking to replace every single official application that came with the phone. Oggplay already takes care of my music, and it's brilliant. I hope the application UI designers are out of a job by the time S60v4 comes out.
Although I must say the web browser really shines, to be fair.
My Sig: SEGV
Well, Nokia does also simple mobile telephones for those who can't understand the complexity of the high end models. They are called the Series 40-phones and they are not running Symbian OS. If you are not a gadget freak that wants all the new features of Series 60 OS and N-series plus possibility to use a large number of 3rd party applications, you propably better to get a Series 40 phone which is not based on Symbian. And if you really want simplicity and lifestyle and status, you can always get a Vertu-phone if that is the style & feel you are looking for. It is nearly guaranteed that you have a higher status phone if you have a Vertu than any of your neighbour. As a gadget-lover and early adopter, I am using the Nokia N93 camcorder phone which runs the Series 60 software which is based on Symbian OS. I got it for the features of it, the user interface played insignificant role and besides of that, as a nerd, it is no problem to use it, it is a lot easier to use than phones from other manufacturers that I have tried, despite of being packed full of features. I could even call the user interface quite intuitive and it is quite quick to do thigns I want to do with it, generally I am very happy with it. Of course I prefer more the touch screen interface of my Nokia 770 Internet Tablet and it is also otherwise a lot nicer as it runs Linux rather than Symbian OS, but as a phone and camcorder the N93 does just fine and compared to the current available alternatives, the N93 is an excellent choice for the use cases it is best intended. There are two kind of people, those who want to get these multimedia computers and those who don't. Both are significant and there are choices for both of them - for the multimedia computers, go for N-series and for the simplicity go for Series 40. There are choices for everyone, better luck next time picking the correct choice. I am happy with my feature rich devices which have high cool and geek factor, I have my devices to be able to do all sorts of things including phone calls, not to do only phone calls, in fact, most of the time I am using my phone, I am not having a telephone conversation with it, but doing something else, e.g. taking video. The video quality of my N93 is pretty nice for a camera phone and the quality of all the stuff it does is top notch. But for those who want to just talk with their phones or who aren't technically oriented enough to use the advanced features (despite they are pretty simple to use really on the N93, the UI is not bad in my opinion, e.g. Windows is zillion times harder to use than that) of it this is not the correct choice, there are number of simple Series 40 models for those.