To set the scene for the month of August, Edinburgh turns from being the Scottish Capital to the largest Arts Festival in the world, with over 19,000 performers, putting on over 2,000 productions on a mostly daily basis for three and a half weeks. And I do a lot of reporting from it, and generally testing out technology ‘in the field’.
This year, Steve and Rafe suggested that I should drop the laptop, hand over my comfortable phone, and run around the city with just the Nokia E90 keeping me connected and organised. Sounds like a good plan to me.
So, to make this clear, this is not going to be a normal review – partly because of the number of shows and real life stuff I have to do that I can’t go through every icon and application in every real world circumstance, partly because Steve's already done a lot on the E90's functions and features, and partly because I think that an ‘only real life’ view of the device is a jolly good idea.
I’ll be touching back on this issue over the next few weeks, but for now, after forty eight intensive hours, I’m not sure that I’m as impressed with the E90 as I was with receiving previous communicators. I think that this is because of the move away from Series 80 to S60 – interfaces that were fundamentally designed for different things (full qwerty keyboard vs one-handed operation respectively) and, while S60 has been through many iterations on a number of devices, this is the first iteration with both the massive 800 pixel wide internal screen, a second 320x240 external screen and the clamshell form factor. Series 80 went through arguably four iterations to reach the 9300i.
And I think that this ‘first gen’ principle shows through. Personally I have a big bug bear with fonts. I like them all to be the same size in an interface – and while I can understand some tweaks to highlight an area, S60 on the communicator has a massive number of fonts that change size between screens and areas just… because. I counted five different font sizes in the basic UI over three screens at one point.
This also rolls onto my biggest problem. I like to set preferences and leave them, but with fonts, especially in the web browser, a size that works on the internal screen is much too large on the external screen (thanks to the physical size of the pixels). The simple chore of zooming in and out just drives me crazy, and means that for all the benefit that S60 on the outside screen could have, I’m effectively ignoring it.
What I do like though is the familiarity of S60, and the compatibility with tools such as Lifeblog and Shozu, both used to manage my media. There is a much larger range of S60 software than for Series 80, and they all run on the E90 – but the larger screen does sometimes cause problems. I see that Nokia haven’t re-worked the Java engine to let it know the two soft-keys are now on the side of the unit, rather than underneath the screen. Which leads to some interesting mental gymnastics when choosing a button.
Also, the quickness of use on the Communicator has been lost because of the dual screen – the 9300i is available to use on opening in under a second – effectively instantly. But the E90 takes two seconds or so to redraw the screen, resize the elements, and respond to the key presses. Not good at all, and it really destroys the nature of a cutting edge device to have to wait every single time.
So to sum up, my first few days with the Nokia E90 has felt like rolling a big ball up a hill. Familiar tasks have been a little bit more frustrating and, while it is a great converged device, it feels like all the bits and pieces aren’t quite working together. Yet.
More on the applications next time. Now, I've got some performances to go watch...
Ewan Spence, 3 August 2007