Since a couple of months, I’ve been excitingly waiting for the Nokia N97 I ordered in May to arrive in my mailbox. The other day, when I finally got my hands on it my high expectations were brutally crushed. Frankly, I was depressed by the user experience. Since it officially made it to the stores, the new flagship device from Nokia has also been publicly bashed by reviewers across the world – and not completely without reason.
The few strong areas where the N97 still keeps itself above the surface are the excellent dual-flash 5 MP camera, the hardware build and the familiarity of the Symbian S60 to devoted S60 users. Looking back, it really is a huge improvement to previous Nokia high end phones, no doubt about it. Still, when compared to its real competitors such as the HTC Touch Pro 2 and Hero devices, the iPhone 3G S and the Palm Pre, the N97 is not able not keep up at all. The user experience is completely outdated already at launch and to me it is not at all acceptable for something coming from the leading mobile company in the world.
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Mattias Mobile HTC Hero, N97, Nokia, phone, user experience
We all know Nokia, it is the leading mobile phone brand and is heavily pushing to stay there. Unfortunately, the huge corporation is seriously struggling with keeping up with the user experience in the smart phone area and competition from Apple, HTC, and now Palm with its new WebOS. They are all a few steps ahead currently. As a previously devoted Nokia user I’ve collected a few simple ways to improve the Nokia S60 user experience to a more acceptable level. I’ve been testing these out on the Nokia E71 and partly on the new N97 as well.
Anyway, the top 5 top 6 list below is a current snapshot of my best findings. If you have found any other great tweaks and application suggestions I’m more than happy to try them out and update this post accordingly.
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Mattias Digital media, Mobile application, email, media, navigation, Nokia, S60, smart phone, software, user experience, web browser
I have a lot of gadgets in use and I really don’t like keeping separate versions of my contacts (~500 of them) and my calendar. Therefore, I’ve done the painful work of trying to find the perfect and free solution for syncing them between all my different digital storages automatically over the Internet including a Nokia E71 phone, an iPhone, an HP 2140 HD laptop running Windows XP with local mail and calendar software (currently Outlook 2007), a Mac Mini as well as Gmail contacts and Google calendar for online access. I really recommend you back up your data properly before starting a journey like this. Once done, you should be care free of backups and up to date versions of your stuff.
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Mattias Digital media, Mobile, Tutorials Apple, calendar, contacts, Google, Nokia, outlook, phone, software, Soocial, sync
First Impression (4/5)
I was really excited about the release of the new Linux based OS2008 for Nokia Internet Tablets (N800 and N810) and after getting my hands on the tools to upgrade my old N800 to OS2008 I was both impressed by the improvements but also depressed by the missing polish of the user experience.
Reading about the release before trying it out raised my expectations even higher, as early bird discussion boards give you the impression that the OS2008 release was clearly faster than previous versions, even increasing the clock speed of the N800. Also, using your clumsy fingers instead of a stylus with the touch screen was highlighted as one of the many aims to make it much more user friendly. An expanded portfolio of cool and useful applications like maps and navigation was also on the shortlist of improvements. The Nokia team and open source community now had my very high expectations to manage.
Firing up the newly flashed Nokia N800 Internet Tablet went well and the new look and feel, showing off the now so trendy glassy UI made me feel like I had a new device in my hands. Playing around with the new, simplified menu structure optimized for fingertip usage reinforced the early discussion board comments about better usability. So the first impression was great, I give full credit to the development team for these great enhancements.
Unfortunately, this is where the much of the fun ended!
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Mattias MID maemo, N800, Nokia, review, touchscreen
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