Out of Nokia’s Beta labs comes another application that could well make the grade and get bumped up to a ‘full’ (firmware) Nokia application in the future. Nokia Channels is promoted as a ‘media service’, giving you access to newspapers and content from around the world. How strong is it, and can it stand up to the full might of the open internet and the power of RSS readers?

Okay, this is going to be painful, because the answer is “not very well in most cases”.

First of all, the user interface is nothing like you’d expect from S60. S60 is already complex for new users - having everything look similar in different screens and applications, from button placement, font sizes and expected behaviour is one of the keys to reducing the problems of navigating user interfaces and finding things. Nokia Channels throws all that out the window.

There is an argument that beta testers are going to live with interface changes, but if the Channels app is to remain as it is, then this is a bad design choice. And if it will later switch back to something more standard, then an awful lot of testing time is being wasted.

Secondly, the content available is incredibly sparse. For the UK, for example, there is one channel. The Sun. Now I know it’s a very popular newspaper, and its political coverage can be in-depth (really? Ed), but it’s only one choice. That’s your lot, for all the UK (although I have to admire the gall of the directory manager in putting it in the ‘Entertainment’ category).

The USA fares little better, with the option for the New York Times being the solitary channel for the new world. At least that’s in the News category. Perhaps not surprisingly with this product, Finland fares best with a massive eight channels.

Each channel has elements of its own design added – newspaper logos, advertising, sections and layouts – almost like a mini-style sheet must be hiding in here, and it’s partly for this reason that you cannot add your own channels. So if you’re looking to add in a bundle of Symbian based web sites and blogs to create your own ‘smartphone’ channel then you’re out of luck, and this significantly devalues the application for me.

All of these problems are a shame, as it is actually very nice to use – N95 users can switch on screen rotation, so flipping the N95 onto its side will move the screen from portrait to landscape automatically (another use of the built in accelerometer). It’s cute, but I switched it off as it would flip over while I was walking and reading! There is a lot of content in each channel, typically broken down into sections. This suits the newspaper format quite well, with sections for Politics, Headlines, Sports, etc. easily navigated to.

Reading through the articles is lush, with pixel smooth scrolling, but it’s at quite a slow speed so you’ll be leaning on the down key very often. Left and right on the d-pad switches between articles, and the right soft key takes you back to the index (which is hidden when reading articles – new users may think it doesn’t do anything because of this – it’s reasonably clear, but with no on screen indications it can be confusing). And while it’s nice to see a graphic representing the page turning over, it’s something I would dearly love to switch off - if there were any preferences I could alter.

Once you start navigating a channel, you’ll find there’s a lot of content, and it’s one of the few times when navigating a mobile version of a publication where I feel I’m getting all the content that I would get if I went to either the full web site on my PC or even (shock horror) bought the physical paper.

But the benefits of Channels, at the moment, are outweighed by the problems mentioned earlier. Of course, it is a product in the Beta Labs, which is out there to gain product knowledge and find out what can or can’t work in the mobile market. And here is where Channels faces the biggest problem.

Where would it sit in the Nokia software suite? Every S60 device comes with a built in web browser that features an RSS text/news reader – wouldn’t time be better spent polishing this and bringing it up to a par with third party RSS readers? The Podcasting application is also a fully featured multimedia RSS client as well (albeit geared towards audio in its current form); and even Nokia Widsets is a far more user accessible way of getting news and content into a device using RSS.

While Channels is a nice additional application, how much use it gets is going to be directly measured by the content currently available through the system. If Nokia Beta Labs want a genuinely well adopted application to take into the mainstream, they should concentrate on getting partners on board – or let us add our own.

-- Ewan Spence, Jan 2008