Nokia have lost their way. Profoundly.
Before Christmas some complete bastard nicked my backpack. Not a bad haul for them: shoes, jeans, shirts, bottle of champagne, box of chocolates, wallet, ipod, phone. Bastard bastard. Oh well, these things happen. I replaced various bits and pieces and the last of them to sort out was the phone. New gadget time. I wanted to stay with Orange and they didn't have the iPhone at that point so that made the choice more difficult. I've had fairly good experiences with Nokia phones and one ghastly one with a Motorola phone so I was inclined to stay with Nokia. I kind of wanted a phone with a keyboard so that limited things a bit more. In the end I plumped for the Nokia e75 expecting it to be adequate. It's not; it's horrible. It's not just not a good pocket computer - it's not even a good phone.
Previously Nokia phones have had good quality1 hardware and very usable software. The e75 lives up to the first expectation - it looks and feels nice, if a little heavy (but heavy is good - heavy feels expensive). The build quality is good. The keyboard2 is about what you'd expect. The software is a bloody abomination.
- The damn thing takes ages to boot up from a cold start.
- Screen updates/app launches are slow - it takes a couple of seconds to get into Contacts for instance. Looking up phone numbers is a fairly fundamental usage pattern.
- Slow responsiveness means that getting to the point where you can actually dial a number is non-intuitive; you're waiting for the OS to get around to it even while you try to dial a number in manually.
- The provided web browser is a bodged usability nightmare - unusable. Installing Opera Mini gets you a browser that just about gets the job done, but because it's forced to defer to the phone's OS for things like text input there are glaring discontinuities in the quality of the experience.
- The email package is unusable - it's easier for me to use Opera to get at my webmail account than to use the provided email client to get at my email. This is a phone with 3G and a keyboard FFS - did nobody even try to use the damn thing in the real world before they foisted it upon the customers? The thing's so flakey that you can never be sure whether it's being mysteriously slow at getting the connection or has hung. There's an "updating" icon but it doesn't go into animated mode unless you back out of the inbox and go back into it. Even if you do that it carries on animating when the app's crashed so you might as well give up.
- The camera is extraordinarily bad. In poor lighting conditions it is astoundingly noisy. This means any indoor shots - not just in the evening; light from a window on a bright day isn't sufficient. Nor is the flash. In fact the flash makes no discernible difference to the quality of the pictures! I'm not comparing it to my Nikon for quality - I'm comparing it to the steam powered Nokia 7630i3 I had before which had a camera that was merely mediocre rather than utterly pointless.
- I did briefly toy with the idea of installing PuTTY onto the phone but gave up rapidly. There's no obvious way to access a binary file on the memory card from the built in OS.
- The music player doesn't have any obvious way to play a group of songs. Perhaps there's a way but I couldn't find it.
These last two problems might possibly be ameliorated by using the Nokia Connect software on my PC to install things but I've avoided this for two reasons:
- I have in the past used Nokia Connect with my Nokia 7630i. I would rather smear excrement on my face than use it again.
- Even if I hadn't used it in the past, the software on the phone is so monumentally bad that nothing on earth would persuade me to contaminate my PC with something from the same authors.
Having been bitten by a manufacturer that I always had reason to trust4, there is no way that my next phone will be anything other than an iPhone - plenty of people hate the iPhone for what it represents (Apple, Steve Jobs, smug hippy software developers, smug yuppie bankers) but nobody much hates it for what it is - a decent working phone with some high quality applications. Niggles about "such and such an interaction isn't completely intuitive" don't cut the mustard when compared with "doesn't work properly".
In fact I think this is Steve Job's real genius: his company makes products that work properly. The software is finished. Not perfect, but definitely finished. Nokia, it seems, now make products that look quite nice but don't do what you bought them for. Once your customers start realising that you're doomed, so my prophecy is that Nokia's going to sink until it only exists (perhaps) as a brand owned by someone else and Apple will continue its inexorable rise until they take their eye off the ball and stop paying attention to making products that work properly.
The others? Until they stop defining their products by running to keep up with Apple I'll give it a miss. If you're chasing that hard you probably think you don't have time to finish your software.
1. Not always reliable though - in general they've been fine but one phone, as a result of a design flaw in the screen connection, had to be replaced half a dozen times before I got a good one. However the one that finally worked properly is still in active use by the mother of an ex-gf several (six I think?) years later which rather makes up for that.
2. What I really want is a Psion 5mx that's also a phone. I wish someone would buy the patent for that clever keyboard and build it into something with a more topical version of the processor - it's ironic that the software on that is the antecedent of the horrible cockup on the Nokia.
3. The Nokia 7630i was a reasonable phone. As a phone it was good and because it made no pretension to being anything other than a phone I was happy to accept the limitations.
4. The last time I got brand-fucked was with a Panasonic DVR that proved barely usable and seemed to be the result of taking their DVD, HDR, and tuner products and then nailing them together. There were glaring discontinuities when switching it between its byzantine modal states.