PC Pro, a magazine I subscribe to and love to love, as well as love to hate sometimes, reviews the Nokia E65 in the current issue 151. All's going well in the review until we get to the following sentence:
"The operating system is Nokia's venerable Symbian OS, which has plenty of software available for it, but it's comparatively sluggish, even for simple tasks such as sending SMS messages."
Leaving aside the fact that Nokia doesn't actually own Symbian and leaving aside the odd use of 'venerable' (is Symbian OS worthy of worship - maybe the writer has a point...?), this was on top of several other mentions in the press recently of S60 being 'slow', and it got me thinking.
Overall, I'd say that S60 is as 'fast as you might expect', meaning that there's a processor of deliberately limited speed (to extend battery life) doing the best it can to do many jobs that you might otherwise expect a desktop to do. Such as displaying and replying to emails, rendering web pages, previewing 2 megapixel photos, showing videos, running mapping software and other third party applications, and so on.
The fact that Windows on a 3GHz desktop renders a large photo in under a second whereas your 200MHz S60 smartphone takes almost three seconds is actually a pointer to the fact that the smartphone's OS is several times MORE efficient than Windows. After all, if a smartphone had a 3GHz processor.... but then battery life would be measured in minutes.
Similarly, to take the example of creating a new text message and choosing a recipient on S60, with Messaging already started, click on 'New message' and then 'Text message' - the new message window takes around 1.5 seconds to come up; press in the 'To' field and your contact list will take another second to appear. Are these times really excessive? I don't think so, especially for a mobile device with limited RAM. Unlike the desktop with unlimited RAM, a smartphone has to manage its RAM quite carefully and this means a degree of creating and then destroying RAM-grabbing windows, and this takes a little time.
Of course, you'll have spotted the phrase 'with Messaging already started' above. As with many reviews of Symbian OS smartphones, it seems the journalists are often unsure of how multitasking works, and to be fair they're not helped by Nokia sticking big 'Exit' soft key assignments in most applications. 'Contacts' is the only special case where 'Exit' actually just means 'send to background', but I'd argue that the other core apps, such as Messaging and Calendar, should also be raised to this status and can then always be left running in the background.
As things stand, a user (or journalist) often ends up closing Messaging each time he wants to do something else, rather than using the Menu/apps key, with the result that Messaging has to be opened afresh each time, adding another couple of seconds to the apparent 'start-up'.
A dozen times a day, on my 2GHz, 1GB RAM desktop PC, I tap my fingers impatiently while something happens, usually opening a folder or application, or sometimes even while Windows XP 'catches up'. Yet I wouldn't call my PC 'slow', I simply acknowledge that I ask it to do a lot and sometimes this can take a few seconds. And I don't hear anyone complaining that Outlook 2003 takes 15 seconds to start up....
So why should the fact that a task takes a second or two to accomplish on a much more limited (in terms of hardware) smartphone be a major problem? The answer probably lies in the perception that the smartphone should be as fast as generic 'phones', which generally have much faster and more responsive interfaces. I'll tell you why they're so fast - there's far, far less going on under the hood and the devices can as a result do far, far less.
A typical Symbian OS smartphone has over a hundred processes all running at once in its memory (RAM), all elements that help it work in a real time environment. So, for example, you could be editing a Word document when a call comes in. This is fielded and you stick it on 'loudspeaker' and check your Calendar to arrange a meeting. This reminds you to send off an important email, before you switch back to your original task and carry on editing as if nothing had happened, perhaps printing off your document to a local Bluetooth printer and then starting up Web to browse some news sites at HSDPA broadband speeds.
Try doing that on your average phone.
Steve Litchfield, 21 March 2007
PS. All of which is not to say that parts of S60 couldn't be speeded up a little - my pet hate is the delay when opening and rendering a downloaded email - given that this is always shown in plain text, I really can't see why this should be a perennial speed hump....