Sunday, December 21, 2008

Nokie E71 : good basic phone. But bad business phone


Comments on Nokia as basic phone
1) This phone looks sexy and cool. Its compact, good battery life, sound and voice.
2)But keyboard interferes in the navigational keys and accept/rejectkeys.
Every time you want to accept or reject a phone, the qwertykeys(P&Q) below them will get pressed.

No dedicated button for camera. A useless hardware button for voicecommand/PPT is present. I guess 1% user may be using it. Instead itcould be camera button.

If you are considering to buy this phone against a windows or blackberry phone.. please consider these...

Nokiais still living Ice ages where they think they have invented a miraclebusiness application. But Nokia email features and design are patheticascompared with windows and blackberry. I don’t understand why theyhave not yet fired their Design & Product head. They have come upwith an email client which is like a black & White TV in 2008.There are hundreds of things that goes wrong this these allNokia/Symbian emails phones. They are like a bare minimum life supportfor emails/calenders. They are not suited for business email users. Ihave been using many windows mobile(Samsung i780, HTC, O2, Sony P1i)and other blackberry. Nokia fails ins following -

1. Lousiest processor(360MHz).Other business phones have 400 to 680HHz(samsung i780, iphone,HTCTTYII, Sony Experiea). Takes too much time to open emails,download, swhitch emails, etc.

2. Hundreds of unnecessary system messagesputting phone in modal mode(cant do anything else). Eg.. every time youswitch emails account(yahoo to Gmail) .. a message comes. (a)"Do youwant to Connect?". if said yes, it shows a big progress bar and onecant do anything. In windows Mobile, such idiotic operations are donein background. One can set few mails to download and still go and readother mail. In Nokia you just cant do any thing.., (b)"anothermessage"Retriving mails", Progress bars, etc... Looks like Noida has ahugh documentation team to show mesages.

3. Nokia still believesthat the whole world is hidden in their revolutionary "Options" menu,.They think the world is still living in 1995. Most of importantinformation and all actions are hidden in this great "Options" menu.They are 10 clicks away.. eg.. attachments are all hidden, as if they are not important. Creating new mails is a 10 click process. Options>message>New>email>exchange email> ....What a pathetic design.

4. There is no way to search the emailsin the email list. WindowsMobile does this beautifully. If you justtype few words of either name of person or subject line in email listview, all matching emails are filtered in runtime.. like the contactfilter. Nokia thinks its not important and according to them mostpeople have not more then 5mails in their mail box. I have 400 emailsin 5 emails accounts. Its a hell job on nokia. But very smooth onwindows and blackberry.

5) The moment you enter an email box, by default nokia takes you to the unread mails,no matter its sitting on 51th level. But i dont want this. I want toread the latest mail. So i have to keep scrolling.. or make sure that ihave read all my past 100 mails. Or nokia will punish me everytime...

6)There is no email suggesterlike in windowsmobile. I have to click "To", then go to contacts, thenselect a name(nokia dont show email id), then after selecting, nokiawill tell there are more emails to this name, so select one.. then icome back to email.. Such a big process. Why dont they just copy otherwindows emails function like in Outlook/WindowMobile. In windows phoneif you just start typing name in To field, all matchine emails justappears below.

7) No HTML view. Nokia have decided inthis world- 2009, no one needs to see html mails. They think we areancient caveman. Because of this lack of feature, most of the emailsshow to me as blank body. I dont know why.. Nokia just cant read thosehtmls formated mails. sometime it reads but most of time they areblank. But other mobile platforms - Windows Mobile 6, Symbian UIQ 9 ,etc do show html mails beautifully.

8)If you choose imap as folders format, then you cant have option to download emails by KB size. This is weird..

9 ) i dont know why Nokia cant provide seperate sent , outbox folders fordifferent email account. I have yahoo, Gmail and hotmail. .. all thesent mails of each mail account are put in only one sent mail. Itbecome difficult to sort them by email.. And anyway there is no search emails function anywhere.

10) There are many functions lacking in the email. If you sent a mail, you cant forward the same mail. You can edit the attachments and add new.

11) the folder view is a nonsense...If you select an email account, by default it shows all folder, thenagain i have to select inbox. This i have to do every time. They cantset inbox as default and have folder to switch by options menu.Everything in nokia is many clicks away..

10) Nokia has not at all used the qwerty keyboard as shortcuts. No button is mapped. Every thing is by options menu. What a shame..

11) Most of the places,wrong actions assigned to buttons.Eg. in an calender view, if i get an calender invite, and i click thecenter button, i should show the options to accept, reject, postpone..But instead it starts calling the person. They forget that i am incalender view and the center button should be mapped to theapplications. The green call key is already there for calling. Then whydo such mistakes.

12) The auto suggest for spelling is a bigfailure for qwerty keyboard users. Such users( also me) don’t look atthe screen while pressing keys. Now with spellchecker on, it starttying wrong words. Also, if i want to just check spellings at the endof email, there is no option.

13) The contacts application is really a shame. Now, since thisE71 is an emailing phone, they should show email on mouseover thecontact. But instead, i have to open the contact and then select theemail. There is no way to customize the view of contacts. eg..name+number, name + email, single line view, two lines., show pictures,Show latest added contacts, Show most frequently used contacxts. Showcontacts by date creations, picture view. These features really help toget right contacts if you have 1000+ contact. I do have.

Looking at all this, nokia should not call them self as emailing phone. They are a toy maker in emailing business...

All these above basic features are ther ein windows mobile phone.

More nokia failures later ...

Sameer.