It’s the little things
Sometimes I wonder if some companies actually give their prototype products to people to test in the ‘real world’.
Anyone who knows me will agree that I’m rather in love with my Nokia N95 8Gb. It is, without doubt, the most useful phone I’ve ever owned, and it’s opened up a whole new world of what’s possible with the current technology. For instance, I’m currently sitting in a little hotel in the Andalucia, Spain, typing this up on my phone using the Stowaway keyboard (now sadly discontinued), a combination that fits in one pocket of my shorts. In the past I would have had to lug a laptop along with me so this is quite revolutionary in terms of slimming down my luggage and creating new opportunities to get my ideas down wherever I happen to be.
However, the device isn’t perfect by any means, although I think it’s the best one out there in terms of functionality and features even though the user friendliness could use some improvement. One or two items particularly have had me sitting there thinking ‘did they ever test this in the real world’ as some things just beggar belief in their lack of thought.
Now, I don’t work in the mobile phone industry nor, at the moment, am I in a technology field professionally (although that will change in a few months). However, I’m a geek by nature and so would probably see things similar to anyone who you might consider a ‘power user’, a bit more clued up than a ‘normob’ and therefore I would think I’m exactly the sort of market this phone is aimed at. So then, what do I find irritating about the phone: Well, first of all, Nokia have pushed the N95 as being a real convergence device, one that will have you ditching all the electronic detritus from your pockets to be replaced by one sleek machine that does it all: phone, mp3 player, satnav, video player, gps tracker, email device and web browser. I use mine for all those things, but some are easier than others.
Take, for example, it’s use as a video playback device. On the flight down to spain I’d planned to watch a film as the budget airline I was flying on had no inflight entertainment. First of all the airlines won’t let you use your phone as such and specifically warn you that using a phone during the flight even when it’s switched to offline or flight mode. If the phone manufacturers are going to continue putting this capability on their phones and pushing it in advertising, couldn’t they actually get with the airlines and do some testing on this. I’m allowed to use my laptop, my ipod, a portable dvd player and every type of mp3 player, but not a phone in flight mode. This is patently silly.
However, lets ignore that fact for a moment, as the problem for me is just the same if I’m on a train and want to watch a film on my phone. Now, a film is usually anywhere from 1:30-2:30 in length. I don’t want to hand-hold my phone for that length of time while watching, so I prop it up against a book (why is there no stand feature on a phone designed for this function) with the phone in landscape mode to take advantage of the gorgeous wide colour screen it has. Only I can’t, because the headphone socket is on the bottom.
Here’s a phone designed to be used as a video player, but you can only use it when holding it in your hand. Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t really want to sit on a plane or train and hand-hold the phone for 2 hours while watching a film. It’s a small thing, but it’s the sort that really bugs me, and just the same ‘feature’ makes carrying the phone in a shirt or jacket pocket awkward as the side mounted socket means it tends to catch on clothing. Put the socket on the top.
The other big thing that bugs me is Nokia’s web browser which I really, really dislike because of it’s useability ‘features’, or rather the way they just get in the way of you being able to use it like any regular browser. So, what do I dislike? Well it’s slow, [insert deity of choice] is it slow. It takes a lot longer to load and render a page than Opera Mini does for example. Even more annoyingly, it starts to load and render, and after about half the page is opened and you’re starting to scroll down it, it’ll get to a certain point in the loading, blank the screen and reload again. I mean, ‘what!!’. Once it has loaded fully, I find it will often just stall when you’re scrolling for no apparent reason, for anywhere from a few seconds to a minute or more, which is just infuriating. I don’t have any of these problems with Opera mini, which you would think would be slower given that it’s a java app rather than native, but no, Nokia’s browswer is much slower. This irritated me so much that I simply won’t use the Nokia browser as it makes me want to throw the phone through a window.
Oh and caching pages. With Nokia’s browser, if you want to go back a page, you get offered a quick history of recent pages, which is great but when you select one it completely reloads the page instead of pulling it from the cache like any normal browser. Now, it may be that there’s some setup option that I’m missing, but I can’t find any and I’ve spent quite a while looking. In Opera Mini, for example, it just pings you straight back to the previous page with no additional loading or render delay, exactly the way I expect a browser to work.
If the phone companies expect people to take these new multi-media phones and replace everything else with them, they need to make the useability better for the general public. People like me are prepared to play with them, mess with them, spend hours tweeking them, because we’re geeks and that’s what we like to do. I have a whole slew of neat bits of software loaded on mine to either enhance to user experience or leverage the abilities of the device. My usual way of testing devices like this in the real world is to give them to my mum and see how easy she finds them, and how much explaining it takes for her to be happy using them. My step-dad has an N95, one of the original series and, in a few weeks when I go over to see them again, it will be interesting to see how he’s been getting on with it since my last visit, and whether he’s installed much 3rd party software or is even aware of some of the things it can do. That will tell me far more about how these devices are doing in their acceptance in the world of normobs than anything you’ll find on a geek forum.
I’ll report back after that visit and let you know what I’ve found.
