Wise Rhetoric

I absolutely hate touch screens, yet I bought this phone.

Why?

This is a question for Nokia: if other people hate touch screens like I do–and they do–why do you think they’d buy the N97 with its inferior resistive touch screen over the iPhone’s superior capacitive screen?

Here’s the reason: FULL QWERTY KEYBOARD.

So when you make a phone with a “full qwerty keyboard,” and then you omit a dedicated row of numbers, it’s not really a full qwerty keyboard now, is it? I come from a long line of QWERTY Nokia phones such as the 6820/6822, E70 and the Nokia E90 before this. The E90 has a full keyboard, complete with ctrl key so you can do seemingly simple things like copy (ctrl+c) and paste (ctrl+v). With my Nokia E90, typing was a breeze. You could even skip between words in sentences while typing text messages by holding ctrl and pressing left or right like you can in Windows (or even highlighting those words by pressing “shift”).

So imagine my disappointment when it took me a full minute of hunting through menus to forward a contact’s phone number to someone via text message. Short of looking up the number, writing it down on a piece of paper, then typing it back, there’s no other way to do this. What was a simple task on E90 and E70 (simply click options on the contact and it takes you to a sub-menu where you can copy the phone number into your clipboard), is an unwieldy chore on the N97. Here’s how to copy a phone number to your clipboard: Contacts->Click on the contact->Options->Edit->Click on the phone number->Options->Editing Options->Copy->Start->Drag your finger across the number->Click Done. Absurd! And Lord knows how to paste it once you have it on your clipboard (you can only paste in apps that support the “Editing Options” submenu, so forget about pasting information in forms and menus on the phone for a quick lookup). I’ve scoured the Internet and there’s simply no way to do this.

Nokia has literally reduced functionality on this phone.

Also, I can’t stress enough how annoying it is to have to shift to type numbers, and to have to shift to type a comma. Are you kidding me? Commas are (or should be) the most used punctuation, up there with the period. Nokia’s choice to make you shift to get a comma is dumbfounding.

About the apps:
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-Browser: the browser is frustratingly stupid. In older Nokia phones, you could simply type shortcuts while browsing 1 = enter URL, 2 = search, 3 = reload, 5 = switch between windows, etc. They removed this functionality from the browser. Why?! It’s so annoying I could punch a vase. Why did you remove functionality that you had before, Nokia? Why? Nice one.

-Facebook widget is okay; mostly sizzle, little steak. The presentation is nice, and it updates pertinent information, but you can only scroll through 20 or so entries in the live feed. There’s no way to go trawling through a day or two of updates like you can by simply pointing your browser to the mobile version of Facebook.

-Amazon app: throw it away. It’s little more than a mobile front page that literally takes you to browsing on Amazon’s mobile site.

-AP News: does what it’s supposed to. Video quality was good, news is what you’d expect from AP. Fairly functional app.

-Guitar Rock Tour (like Guitar Hero): boring and unresponsive on the touch screen.. you have to tap too hard to register a click, so it slows the gameplay down and is exhausting to play.

-AccuWeather: fairly accurate weather forecasts, though typing “weather [zip]” in Google seems to give more accurate results (AccuWeather seems to return results for the city you’re in, but in a large coastal city like Los Angeles for example, a few miles can make a big difference).

Usability:
———-

-There’s a volume control button on the side that pivots up or down, and it only seems to work on calls. Since the buttons are there anyway, why not put them to use by allowing users to scroll up or down through menu items or web pages? Dragging around on the touch screen is frustratingly inaccurate and a chore.

-There’s a nice lock button on the side of the phone that seems fairly responsive (you can lock/unlock with a flick of your thumb). It did occasionally leave the screen black when I unlocked. I’ve updated to the latest firmware and haven’t noticed the issue since, but it’s disconcerting when it happens.

-Exiting applications is TORTURE. In other Nokia phones, it’s fairly easy to exit (just click the menu item, press up and it takes you to the bottom of the menu to exit). Or simply press the red “hang up” button and it will exit most apps. Not here. Pressing the red button does nothing (it only takes you to the home page). So before you know it, you have 20 different apps running in the background, all hogging up memory.

-When you enter a sub-menu like the one for choosing symbols by pressing the “Sym” button on the keyboard, it’s impossible to exit this menu. You have to choose a symbol, even if it’s one you don’t want, and then erase the symbol you chose. This underscores how poorly thought out the usability is.

-Typing while in touch screen mode requires you to use a 10-key pad like on a traditional cell phone, and doesn’t allow you to type using a full on-screen keyboard. This is so incredibly stupid that I almost vomited.

Anyway, the phone has some pluses, such as the 5 MP camera, good 3G support, good storage, fairly quick, etc, but I won’t go into the positives because there are a lot of other reviews on here that do. I’ve found that the negative reviews are always the most helpful on Amazon, even when an item has thousands of reviews (the negatives always point out stuff that I would also find annoying), so I hope that’s also the case with this review.

As I write this, I look at my pretty new N97 sitting next to my clunky old E90. The E90 is a beast of a phone, and yet, it did what it was supposed to do, and didn’t make you jump through hoops to do it. I’ll probably go back to the E90 and its dated apps, even if I have to use the terrible EDGE network for Internet. What I lose in transfer speed will be made up for in typing speed.

————————————————————————
Update: 11/30/2009

I’ve now used this device for a few months, and have a few more insights and grievances:

1. There is very little thought put into the alarm clock function. This is something basic I use all the time–instead of a real alarm clock in fact, so it’s important for it to work well. When you set an alarm, the default setting is to create a permanent alarm that would repeat in 24 hours. Most people use alarms for quick reminders, such as when you park at a meter, or to take something out of the oven. So it’s super annoying to have to go through and click “do not repeat” through a sub menu 5 times per day. Here’s what really annoys me: even Nokia doesn’t believe it should repeat 24-hours by default, because when you set an alarm for an event in your calendar, the default is to NOT repeat. Why the inconsistency Nokia?

2. The slider button to unlock the phone is STILL GARBAGE. I thought it was a good idea, but it works correctly only 2/3rds of the time, even after numerous firmware updates (I always keep up to date). The slider leaves the screen lit every now and then, even when the phone is locked. Sometimes it does nothing (it vibrates but screen stays dark). Sometimes it’s laggy so when you unlock it, it does nothing, then you do it again and it quickly unlocks and locks. Stupid. Get it together, Nokia.

3. When you’re on a phone call and you have to access any applications (such as your contact list to give someone a number), it’s hard to get back to your dialer quickly (so you can switch to loudspeaker or switch calls). You have to hold down the button in the lower corner for 2 seconds, then flip through your open applications to your dialer. Stupid. Why does everything take so long to do on this phone?

4. Speaking of, the entire phone is TOO SLOW. Basic functions like flipping from portrait to landscape, or pulling up your contact list, or going from locked to unlocked when you answer a phone call are almost always laggy (even with no running applications).

5. Browser still has no keyboard shortcuts.

6. Copy function is slightly improved (you can drag your finger across text in a text message and a “Copy” button will come up), but pasting is still IMPOSSIBLE unless the application specifically allows you to paste. So if you get a text message with an address in it, and you copy the text message into your clipboard buffer, you can’t paste it into another application like say, Google Maps. You know, THE ENTIRE POINT OF COPYING AND PASTING ADDRESSES. UGH.

7. The proximity detector doesn’t work half the time. I’m so tired of the phone going to mute or to some random application because it was held up to my head while the phone’s screen was active, so it thinks I’m pressing buttons with my face. Stupid.

8. I hate this phone. The only reason I’m still using it is because of a few opensource apps that only exist on it, and it supports the US 3.5G networks, which the old E90 doesn’t.

I miss my E90.

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Tags: Nokia N97, Nokia Unlocked Phone

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 at 7:10 am and is filed under Cell Phones & Service. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.