Dumbphones = !Smartphones

This is the story of my first usage experience with a ‘smartphone’. Pull up a comfy chair, ‘cos it’s a big one. My experience with the Nokia N-Gage QD was not a happy one. After the novelty wore off, the sheer impracticality of the device wore me down on a daily basis. I bought the phone because it is (still) the cheapest entry into the smartphone category. I believe it is available below Rs. 7000 now. In terms of specifications, it’s not too bad. Some ten-odd megabytes of internal memory, which was pretty high for Nokia phones in it’s class at the time. It ran Series 60 v1.2, which quickly became a downside, and had an MMC card slot for memory.

In theory, all these things are positive. In practice, they just weren’t enough to make it a good phone. Sure, it worked and regularly surprised me by the little advantages of having a true operating system on your phone. I could cut and paste text from anywhere to anywhere. The phone book was fully-featured. Anything that the phone lacked, I could make up for with third-party software and, of course, the games were pretty astonishing for a phone!! In particular, Colin McRae 2005 impressed one and all who saw it run. Opera mobile made a believer out of me in terms of mobile data access.

Now the bad. I can’t help but think I’m being a bit unfair about my judgements. It is entirely possible that it was due to a lack of ‘maintenance’ that my phone did not live up to my expectations, or that I simply got stuck with a lemon. The friend that suggested it to me still uses it quite happily. Anyway, the bad: it was slow. Quite slow. If you’re used to a Nokia 3310, you would be excused for repeatedly pressing the same button waiting for the phone to respond, thereby activating some completely unwanted function from the accumulated keypresses. In particular, I found the simple task of pressing the ‘Call’ or ‘Green’ button to check out my last dialled/received/missed calls an exercise in brain damage. Dialled calls were easy enough, albeit slow, to see. Received were ok too, but missed calls — forget about it. I could have half a cup of coffee before the list came up.

Then there was the frustration of living with al already-obsolete operating system. I bought the QD at the time when the Nokia 6600 was already a popular and tested phone. I chose the QD for it’s price and ability to play exclusive games. Form factor didn’t matter — or so I thought. Little did I know in the shop that the 6600 was already a generation ahead in the version of Symbian it ran. So when the interesting apps came out, like Lifeblog and Sensor, my phone was the ugly, unloved child of the Symbian world. I vented my frustration on my blog when Opera released version 8 of it’s mobile browser for Series 60 2 and above, leaving 1.2 and consequently the QD, at version 6.2. I love Opera — on the desktop and on the cellphone, but I hated them for leaving me out of the new mobile web.

Then there was the MMC weirdness. At the opportune moment, the N-Gage QD would decide that I had removed the card without informing it, and then put it back. That would kill games in-progress, Opera, or anything else really. I later also found out that Agile Messenger is evil and runs all sorts of daemons after it’s installed. It stopped my backup from working. I couldn’t format my phone and it kept getting worse. Even uninstalling it only solved part of the problem.

As my work started getting more hectic, I found myself continually battling the phone to get things done. I wasn’t really using the calendar — it was another application to open, and I could do without that. I would habitually ‘exit’ apps to ensure that maximum memory was free and things didn’t fuck up. I had to rip the huge thing out of my shirt pocket to see who was calling — not a pretty thing to watch with the rubberized, rounded shape. I was finding more and more interesting software that would not run on my phone because it ran an older Series 60. Plus, a 27-year old Senior Analyst working for one of the world’s oldest and largest business information firms carrying an N-Gage QD is just… well… sad.

Salvation came in the form of an inexplicable rise in the demand for the N-Gage QD. As I understand it, they are currently in short supply in India. Perhaps it has something to do with the generous promotions Nokia is running for the phone, and their tie-up with Hutch. Anyway, despite being very cheap to buy new, and the fact that mine was almost 9 months old, I got a good trade for it. I had seen my boss use a very business-like Nokia with a very pleasing ringtone. Further investigation found that it was indeed the perfect phone. Here’s what the Nokia 6230i — my new phone — has going for it:

• It is a Series 40 v2 phone, i.e NOT a smartphone. Sure, I can’t install all that cool software on it, but I’m caring less about that these days. It is responsive and the UI is consistent. It is quite small. But not too small, and has a classic shape. The grey-black colour is understated and elegant.
• The keypad is excellent, but open to debate on the mobile forums. I find myself very comfortable entering text on this device. Even the T9, which for some reason people find flaky on this phone, is excellent.
• It does J2ME MIDP 2.0 with the Bluetooth API. This means little to me apart from the fact that I’m able to play some pretty astonishing Java games on this little thing. Oh, and Opera Mini is utterly insane. It is a giant leap forward for the mobile web. I may have to write another post about it.
• The screen is superb. 208×208 pixels — more than the current crop of Nokia smartphones — packed into a smallish square screen. This makes the pixel density higher than most phones, and makes fonts and shapes look crisp. It is also bright and does 65k colours. A real pleasure to behold.
• It does EDGE. This means faster GPRS for me on the Hutch network, though some analysis has shown that there is no appreciable change.
• Voice clarity is good and the included pop-port headset is great.
• It does MP3, MMC and FM! Yes, I do not need an iPod Nano anymore. The same MMC card that I used with much frustration on my QD works with the 6230i, and has not had a hiccup since I started using it. It’s filled with music and serves as storage for my voice memos and images.
• The images come from the inbuilt 1.3 megapixel camera. The quality is nowhere near what is available with the 2mp Sony Ericsson phones, but is passable. I have figured out how to upload images to my Flickr account via MMS, so expect more frequent updates to that.
• Bluetooth AND Infrared. So I’m never without connectivity. Nokia’s PC Suite is quite amazing. Just putting the phone in front of my Thinkpad makes it detect and I am able to work with the phone immediately.

So far, my experience with the phone has been entirely satisfying. It is not perfect — I’ve had a couple of reboots and some flakiness, but far less than what I was used to with a ‘smarter’ device. I think we, as consumers, have just got it wrong. So long have we been used to a sub-standard user experience with desktop PCs, that we’ve come to accept it on cellphones, with a few bells and whistles thrown in to compensate. I’ve used the Nokia 6600, Sony Ericsson P910 and Nokia 3230 — running three distinct flavours of Symbian. None of them impressed me. In fact, the 3230 has to be the phone with the most compromise today. It is just plain bad.

I seem to often mirror Russel Beattie’s views on mobile technology, but I assure you I arrive at my conclusions through my own, painful experiences. I don’t think Symbian is happening. I am yet to try the new generation of phones like the Nokia 6630 and 6680 (and I may still), but I don’t expect a hugely different user experience. Every time I install an application on a Symbian smartphone, I get the same feeling I do when installing on a Windows desktop — I don’t know w
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t will be left behind when I’m done with it. The last thing I want on the device I carry almost everywhere is OS decay.

So to sum up, I am now a happy camper with a near-perfect Series 40 phone. There are many developments that hold promise: Access-PalmSource-China Mobilesoft, the new Treo 700w, Nokia’s 770 tablet and such. It’s worth watching the mobile space.