All About Symbian - Symbian, Nokia and S60 unwrapped.
Nokia Conversations addresses "buttons on smartphones"
Published by Ewan Spence at 10:39 UTC, July 23rd 2010
They might have well started flying a kite in lightning, because this is going to raise some eyebrows. Nokia’s latest blog post on the Conversations site starts out with “My name is Ian and I prefer buttons on my mobile phone.” You can probably guess where the conversation is going, because many people believe that the only form for a smartphone is a touchscreen slab. It should be a good debate!
Your touchscreen devices do, admittedly, look very shiny and minimalist. They look lovely. Really. Well done, you. Pictures look sooo much better on your phone than they do on my quarter-VGA postage stamp of a screen. And that app that you downloaded that makes your Twitter followers into 3D holograms while whistling the national anthem? It’s really clever. I am sure that you are also very successful and have an expensive car.
But listen, right. This is what I care about. Making phone calls. Sending and receiving messages and email. That’s it. And I can do that faster than you. I can also do it with one hand, should I be holding say, an umbrella in the other. Good luck with the rain on your very expensive electronics.
(The blog post also gets bonus points for getting in a Nathan Barley reference).
Of course there are lots of smart things you can do with a kite in lightning (like discover electricity) in exactly the same way that there are lots of reasons to have buttons as the primary interface on a smartphone.
As with everything, there is a lot of personal choice involved in a smartphone, and there are still a number of circumstances where I’ll reach for the perfectly average E75 as my weapon of choice instead of the more flashy and stylish looking X6. I’m expecting a lot of comments that swing between functional and this is what the market expects.
Mind you, the market expected flip phones to be the way forward at one point…
More at Nokia Conversations.
News Discussion
If all the guys want is to make phone calls, I do 100% agree his is best.
My smartphone allows me to do plenty (agenda, web, apps, photos, ...) and, BESIDES THAT, also allows me to place phone calls.
It's the difference between guys who had a PDA before and those who didn't...
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Originally Posted by Hardeep1singh
I want a T9 keyboard on my smartphone along with a touch screen.
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I want a sliding T9 with a 2.8" or (maximum) 3.0" touchscreen, .. which doesn't yet exist.
(Aino would be the closest, but it's not Symbian, not full touch and it doesn't have the DPad on top)
I've been using a touchscreen-only phone for a couple of years, and touchscren phones in general for a lot longer. I've also used non-touchscreen phones, of course.
I can just about reach all the screen with my thumb while holding it one handed, but it's a bit of a stretch. The thing is, I don't need to. If I'm walking in the rain, I'm not really going to be wanting to play games. If I need to phone or text someone, I can easily do this one handed while keeping to the lower half of the screen which is easily reachable one-handed.
I'd say that you do have to look at the screen when typing with a touchscreen phone (at least I do) but with the error correction on modern touchscreen QWERTY keyboards, or just using a T9 or 20 key keyboard, it's not difficult to type one handed on the move.
The downside is that
a) the E72 is buggy as hell - mostly because S60 3.2 is being neglected in favour of touch versions
b) there are some nice apps about which shouldn't really be touch exclusive, but the concentration on touch means few decent apps are available on S60 3.2 platforms (and this includes most new apps from Nokia).
In short, for business users, the E series is great and would be fully complementary to the touch models, but Nokia has been so obsessed with chasing Apple and Google (a race they cannot hope to win) that they are neglecting their user base.
I'd rather they abandon the touch side with Symbian, go with MeeGo or Android for that, and put the rest of the effort in making top of the range business emailers to compete with RIM and polishing their feature phones*
* - and funny enough there is a huge market for people who just want, well, a phone!
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Originally Posted by Koying
It's the difference between guys who had a PDA before and those who didn't...
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Some of the things he is saying isn't even accurate. I can dial a number on my N97 one handed with no problem. And how is sending and receiving emails faster on a button phone faster? Does he not use punctuation in his emails? I've struggled with sending text messages on my old Nokia 6126 when I want to use various punctuation, symbols, or capitalise letters for acronyms or proper nouns. With a QWERTY keyboard or even a virtual keyboard, I would expect that you can type and send an email way faster than on a button phone.
I queried with Nokia why Point and Find isn't the on the E72 and they told me plainly that Nokia are concentrating most development on the touch experience and suggested there's no demand on devices like the E72. Though that doesn't explain why they released a version for the E71. I'm finding the same with a lot of stuff Nokia release now, and even with frequency of bug fix releases (or just fixing bugs at all, where in some cases they're fixed on 5th edition but they don't bother on 3rd), and same goes for third party app developers.
Yep, that's obvious :-)
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